Agnieszka Rojewska
Agnieszka Rojewska is a Polish barista, trainer and roastery founder. In 2018 in Amsterdam she won the World Barista Championship — the first woman ever to take coffee’s biggest individual title (the wiki’s own champions table lists men in every one of the eighteen editions before hers).12
Four years later she won a second world title in a different sport entirely: the World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship in Milan in 2022, which is the competition for coffee-and-alcohol drinks.34
She founded and runs Sheep & Raven (stylised SHEEP&RAVEN), a specialty coffee brand with a showroom in Warsaw and a roastery site under development in the Polish countryside.5
Why the 2018 win mattered
The World Barista Championship is fifteen minutes on stage, twelve drinks — four espressos, four milk drinks, four invented signature drinks — served to judges while you narrate what you are doing. You get there by winning your own national championship first. The full mechanics are on that note.
Nineteen editions had been held between 2000 and 2018. Every previous winner was a man. Rojewska’s win broke that, and it broke it decisively rather than narrowly: this wiki’s Mathieu Theis note records the Amsterdam final as Rojewska 493 points, Lex Wenneker of the Netherlands 436, Mathieu Theis of Switzerland 396.5 — a 57-point gap to second place, wide by the standards of a final.6
Read the scores with the caution the World Barista Championship note sets out — the scoresheet has been rebuilt several times, so numbers only mean anything against the other competitors in the same final, and the compiled score list is not an official archive.
The second title, and what it says about range
Most competition careers specialise. Rojewska’s does the opposite: she has competed and placed across latte art, barista, coffee-and-alcohol (Coffee in Good Spirits) and cezve/ibrik — that last one being coffee brewed the Turkish way, ground to powder and boiled in a small long-handled pot.
The World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship is the mixology event of the seven World Coffee Championships. Competitors make two coffee-and-alcohol drinks with a randomly assigned spirit at a “spirit bar”, plus four drinks on the main stage; the top six then make two Irish Coffees and two invented drinks in the final.7 Winning it requires bartending skill that the barista championship never tests.
Her Milan routine, as reported by Comunicaffe, ran a coffee negroni, a żubrówka sour with coffee (żubrówka is Polish bison-grass vodka) and coffee mulled wine; in the final, alongside the compulsory Irish Coffee, she served an original called Coffee Champagne, “a drink carbonated with dry ice and clarified with milk”.8
Her earlier record is in latte art, the discipline judged purely on the pattern poured into the milk. Polish Wikipedia records 3rd at the World Latte Art Championship in Budapest in 2017 and 5th in Shanghai in 2016, plus 17th in Melbourne in 2014.9 She also won the Milano Latte Art Challenge in 2015 and competed at the 2015 World Barista Championship in Seattle — three years before winning it.
She won London Coffee Masters in 2018 as well, the knockout tournament run at the London Coffee Festival.
Competition record
| Year | Competition | Result | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2011 | Polish Latte Art Championship | 2nd |
| 2 | 2014 | Polish Latte Art Championship | 1st |
| 3 | 2014 | Polish Barista Championship | 2nd |
| 4 | 2014 | World Latte Art Championship (Melbourne) | 17th |
| 5 | 2015 | Polish Barista Championship | 1st |
| 6 | 2015 | Milano Latte Art Challenge | 1st |
| 7 | 2015 | World Barista Championship (Seattle) | competed |
| 8 | 2016 | Polish Barista Championship | 1st |
| 9 | 2016 | Polish Latte Art Championship | 1st |
| 10 | 2016 | World Latte Art Championship (Shanghai) | 5th |
| 11 | 2017 | World Latte Art Championship (Budapest) | 3rd |
| 12 | 2018 | World Barista Championship (Amsterdam) | Champion — 493 pts |
| 13 | 2018 | London Coffee Masters | Champion |
| 14 | 2021 | Polish Coffee in Good Spirits Championship | 1st |
| 15 | 2021 | Polish Cezve/Ibrik Championship | 1st |
| 16 | 2022 | World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship (Milan) | Champion |
| 17 | 2022 | World Cezve/Ibrik Championship (Milan) | 4th |
Rows for 2011–2017 come from Polish Wikipedia; 2018 from Sprudge and the London Coffee Festival; 2021 from Notabarista; 2022 from her own site and Comunicaffe.10 It is not a complete record — see the flags below.
To verify
How many Polish national titles, and in what. Her own site says “14 Polish Barista Champion” titles and her LinkedIn is reported as claiming 14 Polish national titles across various categories — which is a materially different claim, since fourteen wins of one national championship is not the same as fourteen wins spread over five. Notabarista says three-time Polish Barista Champion and four-time Polish Latte Art Champion, while Polish Wikipedia documents only two barista titles (2015, 2016) and two latte art titles (2014, 2016). No Polish federation results archive was reachable. The table above shows only what is individually documented; the true total is somewhere between four and fourteen and nobody consulted enumerates it.
To verify
The 2022 cezve/ibrik placing. Comunicaffe reports she “also won fourth place in the Cezve / Ibrik championship” in Milan; that page returned HTTP 403 when fetched here and no second source mentions it. The organisers publish rankings as year-by-year PDFs and route older results to a UC Davis digital collection rather than a browsable table,11 so no official ranking page was reachable for either 2022 result. The Coffee in Good Spirits title is carried by her own site plus the London Coffee Festival; the fourth place is carried by one unreachable page.
Sheep & Raven
Sheep & Raven is her own coffee brand. Its showroom is at ul. Siedmiogrodzka 3/u8, 01-204 Warsaw, open weekday late afternoons and Saturday mornings, closed Sundays and Tuesdays; a second site at Mikołajów 16 is described as headquarters and roastery under development.
The interesting detail is what the site admits about roasting. She describes herself as “a hunter of delicious beans” who personally selects the coffees — but the beans are, for now, roasted by someone else: Felix Teiretzbacher, founder of Kaffeelix in St. Pölten, Austria, described on her page as World Roasting Champion 2022.
That is worth naming plainly, because “champion barista’s roastery” usually implies the champion is roasting. Here the selecting and the roasting are separate jobs held by two different world champions, and her own site says so — the roastery she is building is the thing that would change it. It is the same division of labour visible at Simple Kaffa or MAME in reverse: those competitors built the roasting operation first and the title second.
To verify
Felix Teiretzbacher’s world roasting title, and the ownership of Sheep & Raven. The “World Roasting Champion 2022” description comes only from her site; no World Coffee Championships record was checked for it, and this wiki’s Gardelli Specialty Coffees note covers the World Coffee Roasting Championship without listing a 2022 winner. Separately, no source states the legal ownership structure of Sheep & Raven — “founder” is the only word used anywhere. No farm names, varieties, processing methods, altitudes, prices or cupping scores are published for the coffees she sells or for the coffees she competed with.
Other work
Before and alongside the brand, she has worked as a trainer and consultant, travelling to give talks and train café staff,12 and is an Authorized SCA Trainer — a person certified by the Specialty Coffee Association to teach its courses.13
Polish Wikipedia records that she has a master’s degree in management, was a doctoral student at the Poznań University of Economics, and has co-run the café Brisman Kawowy Bar in Poznań with Mateusz Gaca since September 2012 — six years before the world title, which is the part these biographies usually skip.
Her name also turns up somewhere less expected. Luckin Coffee, the Chinese mass-market chain, names her on its Singapore site as part of a panel of championship baristas who blend its coffee, alongside Anthony Douglas and Hidenori Izaki. That claim appears only on Luckin’s own websites and is flagged as unconfirmed advertising on the Luckin Coffee note — read it there, not here.
To verify
Her Carimali role, and her date of birth. Notabarista describes her as Head of Coffee Quality at Carimali, the Italian espresso-machine maker, testing machines. It is a single source, undated, and neither Carimali nor her own site mentions it. No source consulted gives a date or year of birth.
Why it matters
The pattern this wiki keeps tracing — a competition verdict landing on a person and then repricing everything they touch — runs through Rojewska in an unusually clean form, because the verdict landed twice, in two unrelated disciplines, eight years apart in judging skill.
It also did something the World Barista Championship’s first eighteen years had not: put a woman at the top of the sport. The champions table that follows hers reads differently for it — Jooyeon Jeon won the next edition in 2019.
What her case does not offer is the thing Berg Wu’s does: a documented coffee. Nobody has published the farm, variety, processing method or price behind either of her winning routines. See Premiumisation for what usually happens to a lot once a champion serves it — and note that here, the trail simply stops.
Related
- World Barista Championship — the 2018 title, the format, and the full champions table
- Coffee Masters — the London knockout tournament she also won in 2018
- Berg Wu · Mathieu Theis · Emi Fukahori · Matt Perger · Tetsu Kasuya — other competition careers in this wiki
- Mathieu Theis — third behind her in the same 2018 Amsterdam final
- World Coffee Events · Specialty Coffee Association — who runs the championships she won
- World Brewers Cup — the filter-coffee sibling title
- Simple Kaffa · MAME · Gardelli Specialty Coffees — champion-founded roasteries, for comparison with Sheep & Raven
- Luckin Coffee — the chain that lists her on its blending panel
- Premiumisation · Coffee scoring — what a title does to price, and how judging scales work
Official links
- Official site — Sheep & Raven (Agnieszka Rojewska’s roastery brand)
- Official — Agnieszka Rojewska’s own “about me” page
- Official — World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship (World Coffee Championships)