Specialty Coffee Wiki

Anthony Douglas

Properties3
descriptionThe 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.
tagsperson, barista, australia, competition, melbourne
aliasesAnthony Douglas (barista), 2022 World Barista Champion

12 min read

Anthony Douglas

Anthony Douglas is an Australian barista who won the World Barista Championship in 2022, held in Melbourne, Australia — his own city.123

He competed for Axil Coffee Roasters, a roastery and café group based in Hawthorn, Melbourne, where by his own account he had worked for nine years by the time he won. His statement after the final: “I couldn’t have done it without the unwavering support and commitment of the team at Axil, who have been by my side inspiring me for the past nine years.”4

The final sat inside the Melbourne International Coffee Expo (MICE), the Australian trade’s annual coffee fair, which ran 27–30 September 2022.45

He is the third Australian to take the title, after Paul Bassett (2003) and Sasa Sestic (2015), and the fourth Australian win — Jack Simpson, from the same roastery — followed in 2025.

What the title actually is

Worth being precise, because “world champion barista” gets used loosely. It is not a tasting contest and not a latte-art contest. A competitor gets fifteen minutes on stage to serve twelve drinks — four espressos, four milk drinks, four invented signature drinks — to a judging panel, while narrating the coffee out loud the whole time. You get there by winning your own national championship first. The full mechanics are on the World Barista Championship note.6

Winning it in Melbourne added a layer: Australia is one of the loudest espresso cultures on earth, and 2022 was the first world final held there since 2013 — the year Matt Perger, another Melbourne competitor, finished second on the same stage.

How the win actually went

He did not lead from the front. Across the three rounds his marks moved like this:7

RoundScoreRank
1Round One (45 competitors)5441st
2Semi-finals (16 competitors)417.55th of the six who advanced
3Final (6 competitors)499.51st

So he topped the opening round outright, then put in the second-weakest performance of the six semi-finalists, then won the final by thirty points. Each round is scored on its own and nothing carries forward, which is why a wobble in the semi-final costs a competitor nothing except the risk of not getting through it — and why a “series” of championship scores is a much weaker signal than it looks. The World Barista Championship > Scores, and why you can’t compare them section explains why.

The full final, in order:75

PlaceCompetitorCountryCompanyScore
11Anthony DouglasAustraliaAxil Coffee Roasters499.5
22Morgan EckrothUnited StatesOnyx Coffee Lab469.5
33Claire WallaceUnited KingdomAssembly Coffee457
44Takayuki IshitaniJapanIndependent445.5
55Ben PutCanadaMonogram Coffee400
66Patrik RolfSwedenApril Coffee391.5

The runner-up is the more famous name outside the industry — Morgan Eckroth, who by then had the largest personal audience in coffee (their own note has the figures). Douglas beat them by thirty points and is the less recognised of the two everywhere except inside the trade.

The roastery behind him

Axil Coffee Roasters was founded by Dave Makin and Zoe Delaney, a husband-and-wife pair, starting from a single café in Hawthorn.8 Its own site claims “2 World Barista Championships and 7 Australian Barista Championships,” and separately mentions “an incredible win this year at the 2025 World Barista Championships”.

That arithmetic lines up: two world titles, one of them 2025 (Jack Simpson), the other 2022 — Douglas. The roastery displays a “2022_WBC” competition badge on its homepage.9

It is an unusual concentration. Most roasteries never produce a world barista champion; Axil has produced two in four years, which puts it in the same bracket as Simple Kaffa in Taipei and MAME in Zürich — small businesses that treat competition as core practice rather than marketing.

To verify

His exact job title at Axil, and when he started and left. Trade reporting places him at Axil at the time of the win,10 but Axil’s own site does not name him anywhere on the pages, and no source consulted gives a role — head barista, trainer, green buyer or otherwise. The nine years above is his own phrasing in a post-win statement, which puts his start around 2013 but is not a hire date, and no end date is documented either.4 The BeanScene page returned HTTP 403 when fetched here and is cited via the research report behind this note.

The coffee he competed with

One part of this is settled: he competed with a coffee from Finca El Diviso in Colombia. Melbourne coverage published at the time of the win says so plainly, and the championships results dataset records the same farm — two independent records agreeing on the farm name and the country.47

Everything past the farm name is thinner. The lot is linked to the producer Nestor Lasso and usually described as an anaerobic natural Sidra — a rare variety, fermented in a sealed vessel before being dried whole in its fruit. If accurate, it belongs to the same family of heavily-fermented competition lots that Anaerobic fermentation covers: coffees engineered for aroma intensity rather than for classical cleanliness.

Set that against Berg Wu’s 2016 win on a washed Geisha, the plainest possible preparation of the most famous variety. Six years apart, the two routines mark the swing in what a winning coffee is expected to be — from variety-led to process-led.

To verify

The variety, the fermentation and the ownership of the farm. The producer, variety and processing method above come from specialty media and community discussion, not from an official competition document or the farm itself. The championship’s technical sheets, which would record the competitor’s coffee, are not publicly browsable, and no primary producer document was reachable. The community sources also contradict each other on the farm’s basic facts: one places El Diviso in Huila, another in Quindío; ownership is variously attributed to Nestor Lasso, José Lasso (said to have held it since 1997), Luis Contreras and Luis Carlos Guzmán.11 Those cannot all be right. This wiki’s separately-researched Nestor Lasso note places the farm at Pitalito, in Huila, run by Néstor and his brother Adrián — read the location question there rather than here. Do not state the altitude or the exact lot as fact.

To verify

No price, no auction, no score. No Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence or other ACE auction record for Douglas’s competition lot appears in any source consulted, and no cupping score or per-kilo figure is published for it. BeanScene reported that Axil put the winning coffee in front of customers on a roadshow, but no retail price per cup or per gram is given. Any dollar figure attached to this coffee is speculation.

”The Canary”

His signature beverage — the invented drink that closes a championship routine — is reported to have been called “The Canary.”

To verify

The drink and its recipe. The name comes from the title and description of a World Coffee Championships All-Stars episode featuring Douglas (“his WBC signature drink, The Canary”),12 which was not viewed for this note — a video is not a text record, and nothing consulted transcribes the ingredients. A separate third-party YouTube video presents an “at-home version” of a Douglas drink built from honey syrup, strained passion fruit, a date reduction and cold-brewed hibiscus tea.13 That is explicitly a simplified home adaptation, not the competition recipe — do not read those ingredients back onto the stage routine.

After the title

A world barista title is a verdict delivered on a person, and what it mostly buys is a decade of platform. In Douglas’s case the platform came from an equipment maker.

To verify

The La Marzocco ambassadorship. La Marzocco, the Florentine espresso machine manufacturer, announced that “current World Barista Champion Anthony Douglas … has become our global ambassador.” That statement appears only on La Marzocco’s own regional websites — the Israeli and Singaporean editions of the same page — which is one source, not two, and both returned HTTP 403 when fetched here.14 The claim is plausible and comes from the company itself, but it has not been independently confirmed, and no start date or scope for the role was found.

Speaking to Comunicaffe, he described his job after the win as being “the bridge between specialty and customer”15 — the standard post-title position, pointing an expensive competition craft back at people who buy a flat white.

His name also surfaces somewhere less expected. Luckin Coffee, the Chinese mass-market chain, names him on its Singapore site as one of a panel of championship baristas who blend its coffee, alongside Agnieszka Rojewska 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

His life before 2022, and the national title that got him there. No source consulted documents his early career or how he came into coffee beyond the nine years at Axil he claims himself. Trade coverage reports that he won the Australian Barista Championship in August 2022 and that Melbourne was his first World Barista Championship — which would make him a debutant who won on his only attempt. That rests on a single trade report which returned HTTP 403 when fetched here and is cited via the research report behind this note.16 The Australian Barista Championship note separately records that ASCA publishes no archive of national champions at all, so there is nothing official to check it against. Do not print the August date, or “first attempt,” as fact.

Why it matters

Two Australian roasteries appear repeatedly in this wiki’s competition entries — Axil and Proud Mary Coffee — and 2022 is the year the world final came to their home city and one of them won it. Australia now has four world barista titles, more than any country outside Europe, and half of them belong to one Hawthorn roastery.

The second effect is the one the sourcing problems above illustrate perfectly. A win puts a farm name into circulation: El Diviso became a name specialty drinkers recognised largely because it was attached to a world champion’s routine. But the trail from champion back to farm is carried by roaster copy and forum posts rather than by any published record — so the farm gets the fame and the wiki gets a paragraph of caveats. That gap between a coffee’s reputation and its documentation is most of what Premiumisation is about.

World Coffee Championships record

YearCompetitionPlaceCountry
2022World Barista Championship1stAustralia

2022 — World Barista Championship, Melbourne, Australia (1st)

Theme. Building trust through precise coffee preparation and innovative techniques.

  • Coffee — Huila, Colombia (espresso & milk)
  • Variety — Sidra
  • Process — Anaerobic natural, 80-hour fermentation
  • Farm — El Diviso, Nestor Lasso

Footnotes

  1. Wikipedia — World Barista Championship (champions table) ↩

  2. La Marzocco — Anthony Douglas has become our global ambassador (Singapore edition) ↩

  3. Reddit r/Coffee — “Anthony Douglas is World Barista Champion for 2022” ↩

  4. OnlyMelbourne — Anthony Douglas: 2022 World Barista Champion — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 27–30 September 2022 MICE dates, the “past nine years” quote and the El Diviso, Colombia attribution ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. Sprudge — Here are the winners of the 2022 World Barista Championship and World Brewers Cup — confirmed via WebFetch; independent confirmation of the final’s six placings and that the championship was held at the Melbourne International Coffee Expo, with no scores or coffee details given ↩ ↩2

  6. World Coffee Championships — World Barista Championship (official) ↩

  7. Canada Coffee Championships — World Barista Championship 2022 results and rankings — confirmed via WebFetch; the results archive behind this wiki’s championship tables, itself a structured presentation of the official World Coffee Events results; source of the round-by-round scores (544 / 417.5 / 499.5), the six-competitor final table and the El Diviso farm record ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Axil Coffee Roasters — About us (official site) ↩

  9. Axil Coffee Roasters — official site ↩

  10. BeanScene — Try World Barista Champion Anthony Douglas’ winning coffee ↩

  11. Reddit r/Coffee — “ELI5: Finca El Diviso — Who, what, where?” ↩

  12. World Coffee Championships All-Stars Online S6E6 — Anthony Douglas, 2022 World Barista Champion (video) ↩

  13. YouTube — “Familiar Charm: an At-Home Version of Anthony Douglas…” ↩

  14. La Marzocco — Anthony Douglas has become our global ambassador (Israel edition, same text) ↩

  15. Comunicaffe — “My role is to be the bridge between specialty and customer” ↩

  16. Comunicaffe — Anthony Douglas (Australia) wins the World Barista Championship — returned HTTP 403 when fetched here; cited via the research report behind this note for the August 2022 Australian Barista Championship win and “first World Barista Championship experience” ↩

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