Emi Fukahori
Emi Fukahori is a Japanese-born, Zürich-based coffee professional who co-founded the Swiss specialty brand MAME and won the 2018 World Brewers Cup (MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23; Barista Magazine — 10 Minutes with Emi Fukahori, accessed 2026-07-23).
The World Brewers Cup is the filter-coffee world championship: competitors brew by hand — pour-over, not espresso — and are judged blind on the cup they put in front of the panel. Winning it makes the choice of coffee half the story, and Emi’s choice is why she matters beyond the trophy. She won with a Laurina from Daterra in Brazil, at a time when Brazil was widely treated as a country that grew commodity coffee rather than competition coffee.
Story
From London flat white to Swiss champion
She is from Fukuoka, Japan, and grew up in neighbouring Saga (Coffee t&i — Emi Fukahori: Humble and curious, via research report). She first met good coffee by accident — discovering the flat white during a year spent learning English in London in 2006 — then studied hotel management and tourism and was working in the tourism industry when she found the competition circuit in 2014 (Barista Magazine, accessed 2026-07-23).
She started competing in 2015 and won the Swiss Barista Championship the same year, going on to the World Barista Championship in Seattle; she placed third in the Swiss championship in 2016 (same source). MAME’s own site adds a second Swiss Barista Championship title in 2020 and a Swiss Brewers Cup title in 2018 (MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23).
MAME
In 2016 she and Mathieu Theis — her business and life partner — opened MAME, named after the Japanese word for beans. They “met through coffee championships and wanted to create a community where people can enjoy specialty coffee at its best” (MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23; Barista Magazine, accessed 2026-07-23).
It has grown well past a single café. MAME’s own account lists cafés opening steadily — MAME Josef (2016), Seefeld (2018), the MAME Roastery (2019), then Plainpalais, Bahnhofstrasse and Saint-Gervais (all 2023), KURO MAME Tokyo (2025) and Getrud (2026) — and the company began sourcing and roasting its own coffee in 2020 (MAME — About us and MAME homepage, both accessed 2026-07-23). Roles have split along their strengths: Mathieu handles green-coffee sourcing, Emi competes and coaches other competitors (same source).
Mathieu Theis is a competitor in his own right — third at the World Barista Championship in 2018, and a repeat Swiss Barista Champion (2016, 2018, 2019, 2026) (MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23).
The 2018 World Brewers Cup
The 2018 final was held in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, during International Coffee Week — the first time the Brewers Cup had been staged in Brazil (ANBA News Agency, accessed 2026-07-23).
Competing for Switzerland, she brewed a Laurina lot from Daterra in the Cerrado Mineiro region of Minas Gerais. The batch was named “Frevo” — after a Brazilian musical rhythm — and was roasted specially for the competition (same source). Laurina is the naturally low-caffeine variety also known as Bourbon Pointu: delicate, floral and tea-like, with roughly half the caffeine of ordinary Arabica.
Winning a world title on a Brazilian coffee, in Brazil, was the point. Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producer but had long been filed under volume rather than finesse; the win put both Laurina and Daterra’s experimental lots onto the specialty map (Perfect Daily Grind — The rise and fall of ultra-rare coffee varieties, accessed 2026-07-23). Reporting on her presentation says she revealed to the judges only during the routine that the coffee was Brazilian, and described the cup as “exciting, smooth, clean, special and juicy” (European Coffee Trip, via research report).
To verify
How the Frevo lot was processed, and what it scored or sold for. Laurina elsewhere in this wiki records the winning lot as anaerobically fermented — sealed in an oxygen-free vessel during fermentation — sourced from Perfect Daily Grind reporting. The contemporaneous account from ANBA names the variety and lot but gives no processing method, altitude or cupping score (ANBA, accessed 2026-07-23). ANBA also reports that the remainder of the lot went to an online auction scheduled for 21 November alongside 14 other Daterra lots named after Brazilian rhythms, but publishes no price, buyer or lot size. Daterra’s own site does not publish auction results. Do not quote a process, score or price for Frevo.
After the title
To verify
“WBC Finalist 2021.” A sponsor profile lists this among her titles (Storm Barista Attitude, accessed 2026-07-23), but it is a single, non-official source, it does not give a placing, and “WBC” is ambiguous between the World Barista Championship and the World Brewers Cup. MAME’s own about page does not list it (MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23), and the World Coffee Championships site no longer publishes a historical results archive — its public pages carried only 2026 results when checked (World Coffee Championships, accessed 2026-07-23). Treat the 2021 result as unconfirmed.
To verify
How many MAME locations there are. MAME’s homepage says “6 thriving locations across Switzerland”; its about page lists eight named openings including a Tokyo shop (2025) and one dated 2026 (MAME homepage and MAME — About us, both accessed 2026-07-23). The two counts may differ because the homepage excludes the roastery, the Tokyo site, or not-yet-open locations — no source explains the gap. Check the site before quoting a number.
To verify
Her age and when she moved to Switzerland. A 2018 interview quotes her as “31 years old” and “in Zurich, Switzerland for 8 years now,” which would imply a birth year around 1986–87 and an arrival around 2010 (Coffee t&i, via research report). Neither figure is stated as a date in any source consulted here, and both are arithmetic on a single interview. Do not publish a birth year.
Related
- World Brewers Cup — the championship she won
- Laurina — the variety she won with
- Daterra — the Brazilian farm that grew the Frevo lot
- Bourbon — the variety Laurina mutated from
- Serkan Sağsöz — another national barista champion turned roastery founder
- Coffee scoring · Cupping — how competition coffees are judged
- Premiumisation — the market shift her win rode
Official links
Sources
- MAME — About us (official site) — accessed 2026-07-23
- MAME — homepage (official site) — accessed 2026-07-23
- World Coffee Championships — official site — accessed 2026-07-23
- ANBA News Agency — Brazilian coffee wins 2018 World Brewers Cup — accessed 2026-07-23
- Barista Magazine — 10 Minutes with Emi Fukahori — accessed 2026-07-23
- Perfect Daily Grind — The rise and fall of ultra-rare coffee varieties — accessed 2026-07-23
- Storm Barista Attitude — Emi Fukahori profile — accessed 2026-07-23
- European Coffee Trip — Emi Fukahori wins the World Brewers Cup 2018 — cited in the research report; returned HTTP 403 on access 2026-07-23
- Coffee t&i magazine — Emi Fukahori: Humble and curious — cited in the research report, not independently fetched, accessed 2026-07-23