Coffee Sketcher

World Brewers Cup

Properties3
descriptionThe world championship for hand-brewed filter coffee — one round on beans everyone is given, one round on a coffee the competitor chooses and defends out loud.
tagsconcept, competition, brewers-cup, brewing
aliasesBrewers Cup, World Brewers Cup Championship, WBrC

6 min read

World Brewers Cup

The World Brewers Cup is the world championship for filter coffee brewed by hand — pour-over, not espresso. Competitors brew for a panel of judges who score the drink on a standardised numerical scale covering aroma, flavour, body, balance and acidity (World Coffee Championships — World Brewers Cup, accessed 2026-07-23; Wikipedia — World Brewers Cup, accessed 2026-07-23).

It is one of seven annual World Coffee Championships run by the Specialty Coffee Association, and the first edition was held in 2011 in Maastricht, the Netherlands (same sources). The competition moves to a different host city each year and rides along with a major industry trade show.

Not to be confused with the World Beer Cup, a brewing competition of an entirely different kind — the names collide constantly in search results.

How it works

Two services, in this order:

  • Compulsory service. Everyone gets the same whole beans, supplied by the organisers, and prepares three cups. Nobody can hide behind a rare coffee; this round is pure technique — grind, water, pouring, timing (World Coffee Championships, accessed 2026-07-23).
  • Open service. Competitors bring a coffee of their own choosing, prepare three cups, and talk the judges through it for ten minutes — where it came from, how it was grown and processed, how they are brewing it, what the judges should taste (same source).

The six highest combined scorers from the first round go through to a final, which is open service only. The highest-scoring finalist is the champion (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23).

One technical rule matters more than it looks: the brew must measure 2% total dissolved solids or less (20,000 ppm). Total dissolved solids is simply how much coffee is dissolved in the water — the strength. The 2% ceiling is what keeps this a filter competition and stops anyone from serving something espresso-strength (both sources above).

Entry is bottom-up: you win your national Brewers Cup, run by an affiliated national body, and that national title is your ticket to the world stage.

Why it matters

The open service turns the Brewers Cup into a shop window for coffees, not just for baristas. A ten-minute pitch to the judges — broadcast, written up, and dissected afterwards — is one of the most concentrated pieces of marketing a farm or a variety can get, and the winner’s coffee choice routinely becomes the story.

The clearest example on this wiki: Emi Fukahori won in 2018 in Belo Horizonte with a Laurina lot called “Frevo” from Daterra in Brazil — a win widely read as proof that Brazil, long filed under volume rather than finesse, could compete at the very top. See those notes for what is and isn’t documented about that lot.

That’s the same mechanism Best of Panama and Cup of Excellence run on the green-coffee side: a public verdict on a specific lot, which then reprices it. The Brewers Cup does it with a person and a brew method attached. It’s a working part of coffee’s premiumisation story.

Champions

YearChampionCountryHost city
2011Keith O’SullivanIrelandMaastricht
2012Matt PergerAustraliaVienna
2013James McCarthyUSAMelbourne
2014Stefanos DomatiotisGreeceRimini
2015Odd-Steinar TøllefsenNorwayGothenburg
2016Tetsu KasuyaJapanDublin
2017Chad WangTaiwanBudapest
2018Emi FukahoriSwitzerlandBelo Horizonte
2019Du JianingChinaBoston
2021Matt WintonSwitzerlandMilan
2022Shih Yuan HsuTaiwanMelbourne
2023Carlos MedinaChileAthens
2024Martin WölflAustriaChicago
2025Peng JinyangChinaJakarta
2026Nas JaafarMalaysiaBrussels

The 2011–2025 rows come from Wikipedia (accessed 2026-07-23); the 2026 row from the organisers’ own announcement (World Coffee Championships — Brewers Cup winners, accessed 2026-07-23). The official site publishes rankings as year-by-year PDFs and points older results to a UC Davis digital archive rather than a browsable table (World Coffee Championships — Past rankings, accessed 2026-07-23).

2026, Brussels. Nas Jaafar of Malaysia won the most recent edition, held in Brussels in June 2026 with Brewista as title sponsor. The organisers list the rest of the final six as Simon Gautherin, Bavis Kwong (Hong Kong SAR), Jackie Tran (Czech Republic), Ethan Junseong Park (South Korea) and Angie Molina (France) (World Coffee Championships, accessed 2026-07-23). No source consulted says what any of them brewed.

To verify

The 2025 champion’s name. Wikipedia’s champions table gives Peng Jinyang (China), Jakarta. The research report behind this note instead reads the champion’s name off the official announcement video as “George Ginyan Pran” of China (2025 World Brewers Cup winner announcement, cited in the research report, not independently fetched). The country agrees and the two are plausibly the same person under different romanisations, but no official written result was located to settle the spelling. Do not quote a 2025 name without checking the official rankings PDF.

To verify

The 2026 runners-up’ nationalities and the exact final date. The finalist list above comes from a single page — the organisers’ own news post — as read on 2026-07-23, and no second source was available to cross-check placings or countries; the second-place attribution in particular could not be corroborated. The same site gives the event dates as 25–27 June 2026 on the event page but says the champion was crowned on 28 June 2026 in the announcement. Check the official rankings PDF before quoting either.

To verify

No 2020 edition. The champions list jumps from 2019 to 2021 with no 2020 row. The obvious explanation is the COVID-19 pandemic, but no source consulted states that — the gap is inference, not a documented cancellation.

To verify

Who exactly owns the competition. Wikipedia says the Brewers Cup is organised by World Coffee Events, “an organization founded by the Specialty Coffee Association”; the current official site presents the World Coffee Championships as run by the SCA directly (Wikipedia and World Coffee Championships, both accessed 2026-07-23). These may describe the same body before and after a restructuring, but no source consulted explains the relationship.

Sources

  1. World Coffee Championships — World Brewers Cup (official) — accessed 2026-07-23
  2. World Coffee Championships — homepage (official) — accessed 2026-07-23
  3. World Coffee Championships — Brewers Cup winners announcement (official) — accessed 2026-07-23
  4. World Coffee Championships — Past rankings (official) — accessed 2026-07-23
  5. Specialty Coffee Association — accessed 2026-07-23
  6. Wikipedia — World Brewers Cup — accessed 2026-07-23
  7. ANBA News Agency — Brazilian coffee wins 2018 World Brewers Cup — cited via Emi Fukahori, accessed 2026-07-23
  8. 2025 World Brewers Cup winner announcement (video) — cited in the research report, not independently fetched

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