People — A–Z

Champions (35)

• Agnieszka Rojewska — The Polish barista who became the first woman to win the World Barista Championship, in Amsterdam in 2018 — then won a second world title in a completely different discipline, coffee cocktails, in 2022.
• Alejandro Mendez — Alejandro Mendez — World Barista Championship champion 2011, representing El Salvador.
• Anthony Douglas — The Melbourne barista who won the 2022 World Barista Championship on home ground, competing for Axil Coffee Roasters — Australia’s third world barista title, and the one that made an obscure Colombian farm famous.
• Benjamin Brassart — The Brussels roaster who won the 2026 World Coffee Roasting Championship in his own city — the first Belgian ever to take a world coffee title of that size.
• Berg Wu — The Taipei barista who went from selling coffee off a tricycle to winning the 2016 World Barista Championship — Taiwan’s first and still only world barista title, and the foundation of the roastery Simple Kaffa.
• Chatchalerm — The Bangkok cupper known as “Boss” who won the 2025 World Cup Tasters Championship in Geneva — three years of daily palate drills to spend a few seconds per cup deciding which one is the odd one out.
• Dale Harris — The British barista who won the 2017 World Barista Championship in Seoul for Has Bean after nine years of trying — and did it on an El Salvador SL28, the only finalist in the top six who did not bring a Geisha.
• Diego Campos — Diego Campos — World Barista Championship champion 2021, representing Colombia.
• Emi Fukahori — Japanese-born, Zürich-based co-founder of MAME who won the 2018 World Brewers Cup with a Brazilian Laurina from Daterra — the win that made Brazil a competition-coffee country.
• Gwilym Davies — The London street-market coffee-cart operator who won the 2009 World Barista Championship in Atlanta with 623 points — third going into the final, and 17 seconds over the time limit.
• Heather Perry — The only person to win the United States Barista Championship twice in the 2000s, runner-up at the world final, later president of the Specialty Coffee Association — and now chief executive of the family roastery, Klatch Coffee, that put the world’s most expensive coffee on a suburban menu board.
• Hidenori Izaki — The first Japanese and first Asian barista to win the World Barista Championship, in Rimini in 2014 — who then stopped competing, started training other people’s champions, and built a four-seat coffee omakase room in Tokyo.
• Jack Simpson — The Melbourne barista who won the 2025 World Barista Championship in Milan for Axil Coffee Roasters, after finishing third in 2023 and second in 2024 — the second world title for the same Hawthorn roastery in four years.
• James Hoffmann — The English barista who won the 2007 World Barista Championship in Tokyo, co-founded Square Mile Coffee Roasters, and then became coffee’s most-watched teacher — a blog, three books and a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers.
• Jooyeon Jeon — Jooyeon Jeon — World Barista Championship champion 2019, representing South Korea.
• Klaus Thomsen — Klaus Thomsen — World Barista Championship champion 2006, representing Denmark.
• Martin Hildebrandt — Martin Hildebrandt — World Barista Championship champion 2001, representing Denmark.
• Mathieu Theis — French-born, Zürich-based co-founder of MAME — a four-time Swiss Barista Champion who came third at the 2018 World Barista Championship and now buys the green coffee his own company roasts.
• Matt Perger — The Australian barista who won the 2012 World Brewers Cup and finished 3rd and 2nd at the World Barista Championship — then became better known for writing about coffee than for competing in it.
• Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood — Three-time UK Barista Champion and Bath café owner who co-wrote Water for Coffee — the book that made brewing water a serious subject in specialty coffee.
• Michael Harris Conlin — Filipino barista champion and coffee entrepreneur — the first person from the Philippines to reach the World Barista Championship semi-finals, and the loudest voice for Philippine Liberica on the world stage.
• Michael Phillips — Michael Phillips — World Barista Championship champion 2010, representing United States.
• Mikael Jasin — The Jakarta barista who won the 2024 World Barista Championship in Busan — Indonesia’s first world barista title — and who has spent the years since building an export company that pushes controlled fermentation into Indonesian coffee at scale.
• Morgan Eckroth — The Portland barista who became coffee’s most-followed video creator and then won the 2022 United States Barista Championship — the first person to arrive at the competition stage with the audience already built.
• Nas Jaafar — The 2026 World Brewers Cup champion — a Malaysian barista who went from part-time café work to the first world coffee title Malaysia has ever won, brewing a Panamanian Geisha from Finca Nuguo.
• Paul Bassett — Paul Bassett — World Barista Championship champion 2003, representing Australia.
• Pete Licata — Pete Licata — World Barista Championship champion 2013, representing United States.
• Raúl Rodas — Raúl Rodas — World Barista Championship champion 2012, representing Guatemala.
• Robert Thoresen — Robert Thoresen — World Barista Championship champion 2000, representing Norway.
• Sasa Sestic — Sasa Sestic — World Barista Championship champion 2015, representing Australia.
• Serkan Sağsöz — Turkish barista champion turned Dubai roaster, and the man who bought the most expensive coffee ever sold at auction.
• Stephen Morrissey — Stephen Morrissey — World Barista Championship champion 2008, representing Ireland.
• Tetsu Kasuya — The 2016 World Brewers Cup champion — the first Asian winner — who turned his competition routine into the 4:6 method, the most widely copied pour-over recipe in specialty coffee.
• Tim Wendelboe — The Norwegian barista who won the 2004 World Barista Championship, then opened a tiny Oslo roastery under his own name and eventually bought his own farm in Colombia — competitor, roaster and grower in one career.
• Troels Overdal Poulsen — Troels Overdal Poulsen — World Barista Championship champion 2005, representing Denmark.

Producers (27)

• Abner Samuel Zavala — The second-generation Nueva Segovia producer who has placed at the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence four times across eight years — fourth in 2018, second in 2021, first among the washed coffees in 2025 at $66 a pound, and first again in 2026.
• Aida Batlle — The Salvadoran producer whose Finca Kilimanjaro won El Salvador’s first Cup of Excellence in 2003 at a then-record $14.06 a pound — the result that made the country a specialty origin, and the start of a career built on processing experiments rather than varieties.
• Basha Bekele — The smallholder farmer in Bensa, Sidama whose natural-process lot won the 2024 Ethiopia Cup of Excellence and sold for $445 a pound — the highest price ever paid at a COE auction anywhere.
• Carlos Aguilera Franceschi — The third-generation Panamanian producer who turned his grandmother’s farm, Carmen Estate, into a Geisha name — and ran it through the 2023 Best of Panama record and a sale to Chinese owners.
• Daniel Peterson — The third-generation Peterson who separated Hacienda La Esmeralda’s coffee lots by plot and helped isolate the Geisha that stunned Best of Panama in 2004.
• David Pohl — The American green-coffee consultant who was Equator Coffees’ director of coffee and is one of the four owners of Finca Sophia in Panama — today a senior consultant at Boot Coffee on international trade and quality.
• Don Pachi Serracín — The Panamanian producer who first brought Geisha seed from Costa Rica to Boquete in 1963.
• Edgar Moreno — The Colombian quality man who ran quality management for the national growers’ federation and then, from 2008, became the on-the-ground partner in a Japanese roastery’s coffee farm in Cauca.
• Erwin Mierisch — The Nicaraguan coffee grower who also runs the competition — a fourth-generation Fincas Mierisch producer who spent a decade as Cup of Excellence’s operations manager and is now Executive Director of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence.
• Esayas Beriso — The Ethiopian producer behind the Boku and Buku Sayisa coffees of Hambela Wamena, Guji — a former government clerk who left his job in 2009 to farm coffee at 2,350 m, and now runs a washing station that buys cherry from the farmers around him.
• Graciano Cruz — The Boquete agronomist who built a coffee farm that uses no water at all to process its cherries — and turned honey and natural drying into a Panamanian speciality.
• Henrique Sloper — The third-generation Brazilian producer who runs Camocim Estate in Espírito Santo — winner of Cup of Excellence Brazil Naturals 2017 at 93.60 points and $90.20 a pound, and the man behind Jacu Bird coffee.
• Jamison Savage — The American-born producer behind Finca Deborah in Volcán, Panama, and the Savage Coffees brand — a name attached to more world barista stages than almost any other single grower, and to the spread of carbonic maceration in coffee.
• Jean Paul Langenstein — The former roaster who became farm manager of Panama’s Carmen Estate — the technical hand behind its hot-and-cold fermented Geisha lots, and the producer behind Gato Grande.
• Jorge Raúl Rivera — The Salvadoran farmer who planted Pacamara under pine shade in northern Chalatenango with the stated aim of winning the Cup of Excellence — and who died in May 2013, a year before his farm Santa Rosa won it for the first time.
• Kelly Hartmann — Third-generation Panamanian coffee grower — one of five siblings who inherited Finca Hartmann in Santa Clara, and the farm manager who runs the award-winning Finca Sophia on the ground.
• Kenean Assefa Dukem — The Sidama producer whose anaerobic 74112 lot came second at the 2022 Ethiopia Cup of Excellence on 90.25 points and sold for $189.10 a pound — the highest price ever paid for that variety.
• Mauricio Salaverria — The Salvadoran producer who took three of the top seven places at the 2015 Cup of Excellence El Salvador with three different farms in one year — a fifth-generation grower from Ataco who left the commodity market in 2005 and became the country’s best-known name in natural and honey processing.
• Nestor Lasso — The young Colombian producer behind Finca El Diviso near Pitalito, Huila — a farm that went from family smallholding to competition-coffee supplier in about five years, on the back of tightly engineered fermentations.
• Olman Uriel Sauceda Chávez — The Nicaraguan producer and career cupper whose honey-processed Geisha from Finca Elite scored 91.77 at the 2025 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence — the highest score in the whole competition — and then finished tenth the following year.
• Pacas family — The Salvadoran growing family a whole coffee variety is named after. Five generations in Santa Ana, nineteen farms, one central mill — and the odd position of being famous for a plant rather than for a coffee.
• Peterson family — The Swedish-American family behind Hacienda La Esmeralda in Boquete, Panama, whose separated Geisha lot in 2004 created the modern ultra-premium coffee market.
• Price Peterson — The second-generation owner of Hacienda La Esmeralda who steered the family farm from dairy into world-class coffee.
• Ramón Jarquín — The Matagalpa smallholder whose Maracaturra lot “Solidaridad” took second place in the 2025 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence and sold for $14 a pound — roughly ten times what he had been getting for the same coffee.
• Ratibor Hartmann — The Panamanian grower who turned 100 hectares of inherited rainforest in Santa Clara, Chiriquí into Finca Hartmann — the second-generation founder of one of Panama’s pioneering coffee families.
• Sergio Noé Ortez Ortez — The Nueva Segovia producer who has placed in the Nicaraguan Cup of Excellence across four different decades of the competition — from tenth in 2012 to second in 2025 — almost always with Pacamara, and almost always selling to Japan.
• Wilford Lamastus — The Boquete producer behind Elida Estate’s record-breaking Geisha lots, and a leading figure in Panama’s specialty coffee scene.

Founders & pioneers (27)

• Achille Gaggia — The Milanese bar owner who patented a steamless espresso machine in 1938 and later the spring-lever mechanism that first produced crema — founder of the Gaggia machine company in 1947.
• Alfred Peet — The Dutch coffee man who opened a bean shop in Berkeley on 1 April 1966, roasted dark and fresh when America drank stale coffee out of a tin, and taught the three men who went on to found Starbucks.
• Anette Moldvaer — The Norwegian cupper who won a World Cup Tasters title, co-founded Square Mile Coffee Roasters in London with James Hoffmann, and has spent since buying the green coffee — the buyer’s half of a partnership everyone remembers for the barista.
• Belinda Wong — The executive who ran Starbucks in China for most of two decades — 400 stores to several thousand, a farmer support centre in Yunnan, and no lot, score or auction bid anywhere under her own name.
• Brett Smith — The co-founder who ran Counter Culture Coffee for its first thirty years, kept it out of the hands of the big buyers that swallowed its peers, and moved to executive chairman in August 2025.
• Brooke McDonnell — The co-founder and master roaster of Equator Coffees in California — the palate behind a company that started in a rented garage in 1995 and ended up part-owning Finca Sophia, one of the highest Geisha farms in Panama.
• David Schomer — The Seattle café owner who co-founded Espresso Vivace in 1988, fitted PID temperature controllers to espresso machines to stop the water temperature drifting, and is credited with turning latte art into a teachable craft in the United States.
• Duane Sorenson — The Washington-born roaster who opened Stumptown in a former Portland hair salon in 1999, made flying to the farm and paying over the odds the American norm, started a bicycle charity for Rwandan coffee growers — and, after Stumptown was sold, came back with a small roastery called Puff.
• Emma Chamberlain — The American YouTuber who founded Chamberlain Coffee in December 2019 and later became its co-CEO — the largest creator-owned coffee brand, and the clearest test of whether an audience can be turned into a coffee company.
• Erna Knutsen — The San Francisco green-coffee broker who put the words “specialty coffee” into print in the early 1970s, sold tiny lots to tiny roasters when nobody else would, and became the industry’s godmother.
• Francesco Illy — The Hungarian-born founder of illycaffè in Trieste in 1933, who patented the pressurised can that keeps roasted coffee fresh in transit and built the 1935 illetta, the machine that first separated water heating from brewing pressure in espresso.
• George Howell — The Boston roaster who built The Coffee Connection, sold it and the Frappuccino to Starbucks in 1994, helped create the Cup of Excellence in 1999, and then spent twenty years arguing that green coffee should be kept frozen.
• Helen Russell — The co-founder and executive chair of Equator Coffees in Marin County, California — a roaster that started with two espresso carts in 1995 and ended up part-owning Finca Sophia, one of the highest Geisha farms in Panama.
• Howard Schultz — The Starbucks chairman and chief executive who turned a Seattle bean shop into a café chain — the person most responsible for teaching the world to buy coffee by the cup, and who appears nowhere in the auction, cupping or competition record this wiki keeps.
• Jack Ma — The founder of Alibaba — not a coffee man at all, but the person behind the three websites and one delivery network through which most imported coffee reaches Chinese drinkers.
• James Freeman — The freelance clarinettist who started roasting coffee in an Oakland shed and turned it into Blue Bottle — the polished public face of third-wave coffee — then left after selling the majority of it to Nestlé.
• Kentaro Maruyama — The Japanese roaster who founded Maruyama Coffee in a Karuizawa mountain café in 1991, started flying to farms himself in 2001, and became one of the most familiar faces in the Cup of Excellence cupping room — and a past chair of the ACE board.
• Lance Schnorenberg — The American roaster who started as a barback at Espresso Vivace in Seattle, spent three years teaching himself on a 1 lb sample roaster in a Bushwick loft, and co-founded the Brooklyn micro-roastery that became Sey — where he buys the green coffee and argues that the roaster’s job is to stay out of the way.
• Liu Qiangdong — The founder and chairman of JD.com — not a coffee man in any sense, but the person behind the company that paid a record price for a Panamanian Geisha in 2025 and then opened a café chain.
• Peter Schlumbohm — The German-born chemist who invented the Chemex coffeemaker in 1930s New York — a lab funnel and flask fused into one hourglass of glass, the one hit in a career of hundreds of inventions, and now a fixture of both museum design collections and specialty coffee bars.
• Scott Rao — The American café founder turned roasting consultant and self-published author whose books and blog set much of the measurement vocabulary specialty coffee now argues in — and who runs the Boulder roastery Prodigal Coffee.
• Taro Suzuki — The horticulture graduate who runs Saza Coffee — the small Ibaraki roastery that keeps setting world records for the most expensive coffee — and who grows his own Geisha in Colombia. Known in Japan as the “Geisha Hunter.
• Trish Rothgeb — The San Francisco roaster who gave the trade the phrase “third wave coffee”, runs Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, and now steers the Q Grader programme for the Coffee Quality Institute.
• Vanúsia Nogueira — The Brazilian executive who ran the country’s specialty coffee association for fifteen years and then became the first woman to lead the International Coffee Organization — a career built entirely on policy and promotion, with no farm, lot or cupping score attached to it.
• Willem Boot — The Dutch-born consultant, trainer and Geisha grower behind Boot Coffee in California — and behind Finca La Mula, the Panama farm whose coffee took Coffee Review’s number one spot in 2015 at 97 points.
• Yoshio Suzuki — The cinema producer who opened a 15-seat coffee shop inside his family’s theatre in small-town Ibaraki in 1969 and turned it into Saza Coffee — the roastery that now buys the world’s most expensive coffee. Father of Taro Suzuki.
• Zachary Carlsen — The American barista-turned-journalist who co-founded Sprudge with Jordan Michelman in 2009 — how a Drudge Report parody written on café Wi-Fi became specialty coffee’s daily newsroom, and what is and isn’t documented about the man behind it.

Researchers & breeders (2)

• Alcides Carvalho — The Brazilian plant breeder who ran coffee research at the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas for four decades and is credited with the 1949 cross that became Catuaí — the man behind varieties almost nobody buying Brazilian coffee has heard of.
• Maria do Céu Silva — A Portuguese plant pathologist at CIFC in Oeiras whose work is on what happens inside a coffee leaf in the first hours after rust lands on it — one of the two names that recur across half a century of coffee rust research, and a person with no farm, no lot and no cupping score anywhere.

Everything else (2)

• Coffee YouTube — The loose world of people who explain coffee on video for a living — how a hobby channel became specialty coffee’s biggest classroom, why almost none of them are paid by YouTube, and what happens when a creator puts their name on a bag.
• Joe Prewett — The food-and-drink executive who became chief executive of Counter Culture Coffee on 1 August 2025 — the first outsider to run the Durham roaster, though he had already sat on its board for four years.