Specialty Coffee Wiki

Chatchalerm

Properties3
descriptionThe 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.
tagsperson, thailand, competition, sensory, cup-tasters
aliasesChatchalerm Lertanekwattana, Boss, BOSS, Chatchalerm (AKA BOSS)

5 min read

Chatchalerm

Chatchalerm Lertanekwattana, known throughout the Thai coffee scene as “Boss”, is a Bangkok-based sensory specialist and the 2025 World Cup Tasters Champion.12 The official announcement lists him under the single given name “Chatchalerm (AKA BOSS)”, representing Thailand, which is how his name appears in the championship record.1

He works as Sensory Research Lead at Roots Coffee in Bangkok, at the chain’s Central World branch.2 Roots is a Thai roastery-café group that describes itself as “a small team of coffee fanatics” working to a “Cup-to-Farm ethos” — the supply chain read backwards, starting with the drinker and ending with the farmer.3

The 2025 title

The World Cup Tasters Championship is the sensory event of the World Coffee Championships, and it is the plainest test on the circuit: cups come in threes, two of them the same coffee and one different, and your only job is to pull out the odd one — eight times, against a stopwatch. Most correct answers wins; if two people tie, the faster one takes it.

Chatchalerm won the 2025 final on 28 June in Geneva, Switzerland, at World of Coffee.12 The organisers’ announcement describes him “rapidly identifying the odd cup in the triangles, racing against the clock to top our leader board.”1

The official finalist ranking:1

PlaceCompetitorRepresents
11Chatchalerm (“BOSS”)Thailand
22Max MakChina
33Huamin ChenCanada
44Hiroaki NittaJapan

No score or time was published — the organisers release names and placings for this championship, never numbers.

To verify

“First Thai competitor ever to win a World Coffee Championship.” Barista Magazine states this outright.2 It conflicts with this wiki’s own imported championship dataset, which records Arnon Thitiprasert of Thailand winning the 2017 World Latte Art Championship in Budapest with 464.5 points — eight years earlier — and credits Thailand with two golds overall across the seven titles. Both cannot be right. The most likely resolution is that Chatchalerm is Thailand’s first world champion in a sensory discipline, or the first since the Specialty Coffee Association merger reorganised the championships, but neither reading is confirmed by a source consulted here. Treat the “first ever” framing as a claim, not a fact.

How he trained

Chatchalerm came to coffee in 2019, after a friend’s competition post on Facebook pushed him toward barista work and he realised it could be a career rather than a job.2 The run-up to the world title was three years of palate training, sensory drills and mental exercises, six days a week.2

His own summary of what the event actually tests: “Taste is the foundation, but memory and focus are what carry you through the competition.”2 That matches the shape of the test — triangulation does not reward tasting vocabulary, which is what cupping and the Q Grader licence are built around. It rewards raw discrimination and the stamina to hold 24 cups’ worth of impressions in your head without drifting.

Why the win travelled

A Cup Tasters title sells no coffee. There is no lot, no auction price and no farm attached to it, because the coffees in the triangles are test instruments rather than products. What the title reprices is the taster — a professional cupper’s verdict on quality is worth more once they have out-triangulated the world, which is why the job description “Sensory Research Lead” and the trophy point in the same direction.

The result also sits inside a wider shift. The 2026 championship went to Le Quang Cuong of Vietnam in Bangkok, so the palate title has now gone to Southeast Asia two years running, and the championship circuit itself has moved east — Bangkok hosted World of Coffee in 2026. The World Coffee Championships note tracks that pattern across all seven titles.

To verify

Everything else about him. No source consulted gives his date or place of birth beyond “born and raised in Bangkok,”2 and no primary source names the Thai national cup tasters title that would have qualified him for Geneva, though the championship’s bottom-up entry route means he must have won one. There is also no farm, coffee lot, auction result or cupping score associated with his name in any source checked — he appears in the record as a competitor and sensory professional, not a producer. An Instagram account, @causeuseemelikeaufo, is widely reported as his and carries “World Cup Tasters Champion 2025” in its bio, but the profile could not be loaded directly to confirm it.

Footnotes

  1. World Coffee Championships — Announcing the 2025 World Cup Tasters Champion (official) — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the name as recorded, the Thailand competition body, the 28 June 2025 date, the Geneva host and the four-place finalist ranking ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Barista Magazine — Chatchalerm Lertanekwattana Makes Coffee History for Thailand — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the full name and “Boss” nickname, born and raised in Bangkok, the Sensory Research Lead role at Roots Coffee Central World, the 2019 entry into coffee, the three years of six-days-a-week training, the quoted line, the World of Coffee Geneva context and the disputed “first Thai” claim ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  3. Roots Coffee — About us (official) — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the “small team of coffee fanatics” and “Cup-to-Farm ethos” self-description ↩

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