Specialty Coffee Wiki

Dale Harris

Properties3
descriptionThe 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.
tagsperson, barista, united-kingdom, competition, el-salvador
aliasesDale Harris (barista), 2017 World Barista Champion

8 min read

Dale Harris

Dale Harris is a British barista who won the World Barista Championship in 2017, held in Seoul, South Korea.123 He competed for Hasbean Coffee, the Staffordshire mail-order roastery where he was director of wholesale, and where he had worked since 2010.45

He is the third British world barista champion, after James Hoffmann (2007) and Gwilym Davies (2009).

Two things make his win unusual. The first is how long it took: he competed in the UK championship for nine years before winning it, and won the national and the world title in the same season.64 The second is what he put in the cup — an SL28 from El Salvador, when every other finalist in the top six served Geisha.6

The 2017 final

The championship ran inside Café Show Seoul, and the winner was announced on 12 November 2017.23 The World Barista Championship is not a tasting or latte-art contest: each competitor gets fifteen minutes on stage to serve twelve drinks — four espressos, four milk drinks, four invented signature drinks — to a judging panel while talking the judges through the coffee. You qualify by winning your own national championship first.

Harris’s route through the three rounds, from this wiki’s results archive:

RoundPlaceScore
1Round One6th522
2Semi-Finals2nd483
3Finals1st526.5

He finished ahead of Miki Suzuki of Japan (508.5), Kapo Chiu of Hong Kong (507.5), Ben Put of Canada (498.5), Hugh Kelly of Australia (481.5) and Kyle Ramage of the United States (436.5).123 Note that he did not lead a single round until the last one — Hugh Kelly topped both Round One and the semi-final.1

Scores across different years of this competition are not comparable: the scoresheet has been rebuilt repeatedly, so a total only means something against the other five people in that same final. The World Barista Championship note explains why.

Contemporary reporting from the floor singled out his stage layout: he set the judges between two tables so he could serve them from both sides, rather than the usual single bar facing a row of seated judges.2 His presentation was built around aromatic compounds — the volatile molecules you smell rather than taste — and he used gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, a lab technique that separates a sample into its individual chemical components, to show how the work done at the farm shapes what ends up in the cup.4

The coffee

Harris competed with an SL28 grown at Las Brumas in El Salvador, farmed by Ernesto Menéndez as part of his Wild Forest Project.6

That is a genuinely odd plant to find on that stage. SL28 is the flagship Kenyan variety, selected from a single tree in the 1930s and responsible for the blackcurrant flavour the world associates with Kenyan coffee — see SL28. Finding it in Central America at all is unusual; winning a world title with it, in a final where the other five competitors all brought Geisha, is the part worth remembering.6 Geisha had by then become the default competition coffee, largely because of what Best of Panama prices had done to its reputation.

To verify — everything else about that lot

No source consulted gives a lot number, altitude, processing method, harvest year, cupping score, price per pound or roast profile for the Las Brumas coffee, and no official competition technical sheet was reached.16 The farm’s ownership and the scope of the Wild Forest Project are also undocumented here. This wiki’s Has Bean note previously recorded that the winning coffee was unidentified; that is now resolved for variety, farm, producer and country only. Do not attach a score or a price to it.

Before and after

He joined Hasbean in 2010 and was its director of wholesale by the time he competed.4 That matters for reading the result: he was a working coffee professional at a mid-sized roastery running its trade accounts, not a full-time sponsored competitor.

To verify — how long he was at Hasbean

This wiki’s Has Bean note says the trade press describes “around eight years” at the company. Barista Magazine’s interview says he was employed there since 2010, which makes seven years at the 2017 final.4 The two are close but not the same, and nothing consulted gives a start month or a leaving date.

Since the title he has worked mainly as an educator and ambassador rather than a competitor — the trade press covers his knowledge-sharing work, and a green-coffee decaffeinator’s account records him hosting tasting and sustainability sessions for its Earth Month programme.78

He returned to a world stage in 2025, entering the World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship in Geneva, Switzerland — the championship for coffee-and-alcohol drinks — where he placed 11th in the preliminary round with 374 points, competing for Ithaka Coffee.

To verify — Ithaka Coffee

This wiki’s own competition dataset lists Ithaka Coffee as his affiliation at the 2025 Coffee in Good Spirits championship, and search results describe him as founder and owner of Ithaka Coffee, a roastery in the Custard Factory, Digbeth, Birmingham.9 Only the affiliation is confirmed. The founder role, the Birmingham location, a founding date, and whether Ithaka has a website at all rest on search-result snippets that were not opened, and no official Ithaka page was reached.9 Nothing consulted documents when he left Hasbean or what he did between 2018 and 2025.

To verify — the size and dates of the 2017 field

The research behind this note gives the field as 58 national representatives, sourced to trade reporting.35 This wiki’s imported competition dataset records 57 competitors in Round One for 2017. One of the two is wrong, or one competitor withdrew before serving. Separately, the dataset stamps the 2017 event 9 November while the contemporaneous report gives the final as 12 November — almost certainly the difference between the first day of a four-day event and the day of the final, but no official schedule was checked.2

  • LinkedIn — Dale Harris — his own professional profile, surfaced in search results but not opened for this note9
  • (no official website found) — no confirmed personal or Ithaka Coffee homepage was reached

Footnotes

  1. 2017 Barista Championship Results — complete rankings — the competition’s own ranking document; cited via the research report rather than opened here. Its final and semi-final figures match this wiki’s imported competition dataset, which is the source of the round-by-round table above. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Barista Magazine — The 2017 World Barista Championship Finals and Winner — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 12 November date, the full final order, and the two-table stage setup ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Global Coffee Report — United Kingdom’s Dale Harris wins 2017 World Barista Championship — returned HTTP 403 when fetched here; cited via the research report for the Seoul venue, the win and the 58-competitor figure ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Barista Magazine — Dale Harris on Winning the WBC, Part One — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2010 start at Hasbean, the director-of-wholesale title, the nine years of national competing, and the aromatic-compounds and GC-MS routine ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  5. European Coffee Trip — Dale Harris Is the World Barista Champion 2017 — returned HTTP 403 when fetched here; cited via the research report for the director-of-wholesale role ↩ ↩2

  6. Barista Magazine — Dale Harris on Winning the WBC, Part Two — confirmed via WebFetch; sole source of the Las Brumas / Ernesto Menéndez / Wild Forest Project SL28 and of the “only finalist not using Geisha” detail ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  7. Barista Magazine — 2017 WBC Winner Dale Harris Looks Back at His Year as Champ — cited via the research report, not opened here ↩

  8. Swiss Water — Coffee Giving Back with World Barista Champion Dale Harris — cited via the research report, not opened here; source of the post-title education and sustainability work ↩

  9. DuckDuckGo search — “Ithaka Coffee” “Dale Harris” — search-result snippets only, none of the underlying pages opened; the sole basis for the founder/owner claim, the Digbeth location and the LinkedIn address ↩ ↩2 ↩3

Graph View

Backlinks