Specialty Coffee Wiki

Jack Simpson

Properties3
descriptionThe Melbourne barista who won the 2025 World Barista Championship in Milan for Axil Coffee Roasters, after finishing third in 2023 and second in 2024 — the second world title for the same Hawthorn roastery in four years.
tagsperson, barista, australia, competition, melbourne
aliasesJack Simpson (barista), 2025 World Barista Champion

10 min read

Jack Simpson

Jack Simpson is an Australian barista who won the World Barista Championship in 2025, held in Milan, Italy.123 He competed for Axil Coffee Roasters, the roastery and café group in Hawthorn, Melbourne.1

He is the fourth Australian to take the title, after Paul Bassett (2003), Sasa Sestic (2015) and Anthony Douglas (2022) — and the second champion from the same roastery in four years.4

The thing that makes his record unusual is not the win by itself. It is the run that led to it: third in 2023, second in 2024, first in 2025 — three world finals in a row, climbing one place each time.1

The climb

YearChampionshipResultWhere
12023World Barista Championship3rdAthens, Greece1
22024World Barista Championship2ndBusan, South Korea1
32025World Barista ChampionshipChampionMilan, Italy123

Worth being precise about what the title is, 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, narrating the coffee out loud the whole time. You have to win your own national championship to get there at all. The full mechanics are on the World Barista Championship note.

The 2025 final ran inside HOST Milano, the Italian hospitality trade fair, and the result was announced on 21 October 2025.13 Milan is a pointed place to win it: Italy invented the espresso bar and has never produced a world barista champion.

To verify

The scores, and everyone else on the 2025 podium. No official ranking sheet for 2025 was reachable — the organisers publish no results page for it, and the trade coverage that carries the placings returns HTTP 403 when fetched. The World Barista Championship note already flags the reported final six and their scores as unverified; read the caveat there rather than trusting any number. Simpson’s 2023 and 2024 placings above come from his employer’s own announcement,1 not from an official archive, though the same figures appear in an independent magazine profile that could not be fetched here.5

The Australian titles

Simpson is a multiple Australian Barista Champion. Axil states he was Australian Barista Champion “for 3 years running” as of the 2025 world win,1 and trade coverage reports him taking the 2025 ASCA Australian Barista Championship — the national qualifier — for a third consecutive year.6

That national title is the door to the world stage: no country sends anyone to the World Barista Championship who has not won at home first. Winning it three times in a row and converting the third into a world title is the shortest possible description of his career so far.

To verify

Which years, exactly. Sources agree he holds at least three national titles including 2025, but no year-by-year list of Australian Barista Championship winners from the national body was reachable here. A Coffee Magazine profile published before the 2025 win says Axil had held the Australian title “three years running” and that Simpson won two of those,5 while a later piece calls him a “three-time Australian Barista Champion.”7 Those reconcile cleanly if the run is 2022 (another Axil competitor), 2023 and 2024 (Simpson), then 2025 (Simpson again) — and Axil’s homepage does display 2022, 2023 and 2024 national badges.4 But no source states that sequence, so treat the individual years as inference, not record.

The coffee

This is the part that is usually missing from a barista championship, and here it is only half present.

Axil’s own announcement says Simpson worked with two producers on “unique processing methods for his competition coffees”: Jamison Savage of Finca Deborah in Volcán, Panama, and Johnathan Gasca of Finca Zarza in Colombia.1

If Finca Deborah sounds familiar, it should — it is the same Panamanian farm that supplied the washed Geisha Berg Wu won the 2016 championship with, one of the very few competition coffees on this wiki confirmed by two independent sources. The farm sits above 1,900 m in Volcán, Chiriquí, and grows Geisha almost exclusively.8

To verify

Nobody has published what he actually served. Axil names the two producers as collaborators on “competition coffees” in general — it does not say which farm, lot, variety, processing method or roast went into the winning Milan routine, and it gives no signature-drink recipe.1 Finca Deborah’s own site does not mention Simpson, the 2025 championship, or supplying any world champion anywhere,8 and names no founder, so even “Jamison Savage of Finca Deborah” rests on a single source. The competitors’ coffees live in the event’s technical sheets, which are not publicly browsable. No cupping score, no auction lot, no price per kilo and no buyer is documented for anything he competed with — not from Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence or any other ACE sale.

To verify

Finca Zarza is not Finca Saza. The two names look alike in Latin script and research on either one keeps surfacing the other. Finca Zarza is a Colombian farm sold by European traders and associated with the Bombona estate; Finca Saza is a Japanese-owned estate in Cauca with no connection to Axil, to Simpson, or to Panama. The Finca Saza note carries the same caution from the other direction. The spelling “Johnathan Gasca” comes from Axil’s page only and has not been checked against the farm.1

To verify

The “secret weapon.” A BeanScene piece titled “Jack Simpson’s secret weapon” describes him as a three-time Australian champion “shining a light on one of the industry’s most underappreciated areas.”7 The page returned HTTP 403 when fetched here and the research behind this note could not read what that area is. Guesses circulate — water, milk, fermentation — but nothing consulted names it. Do not fill in the blank.

Why it matters

A green-coffee auction like Best of Panama delivers its verdict on a lot and the price per kilo jumps. The barista championship delivers its verdict on a person — and the roastery standing behind that person collects most of the commercial benefit. Simpson’s win is the cleanest illustration of that on this wiki, because it happened to a business that had already banked one.

Australia now has four world barista titles, more than any country outside Europe, and half of them belong to one Hawthorn roastery. Within weeks of the win Axil was selling a “World Barista Championship Tee 2025” and a Barista Champion Selection coffee range.4 That conversion — public verdict into product line — is what Premiumisation looks like at the retail end, and it is why Australian café culture keeps producing competitors: a dense, competitive independent café market trains a lot of professional baristas, and the winners feed straight back into the businesses that trained them.

The second thing his note shows is the familiar documentation gap. The title is on the public record in three places. What he brewed to win it is on the record nowhere — the same hole that swallows Anthony Douglas’s 2022 coffee three years earlier, at the same roastery.

To verify

Everything about him that is not a competition result. No source consulted gives his age, hometown, how he got into coffee, his job title at Axil, how long he has worked there, or what he has done since Milan. Axil’s announcement never states his role, and the one long-form interview found was not fetchable.15

World Coffee Championships record

YearCompetitionPlaceCountry
12025World Barista Championship1stAustralia
22024World Barista Championship2ndAustralia
32023World Barista Championship3rdAustralia

2025 — World Barista Championship, Milan, Italy (1st)

Theme. The performance centered on the theme of human connection and responsibility in the coffee industry, emphasizing the stories and dedication of coffee producers.

  • Coffee — Volcán, Panama (espresso) & Huila, Colombia (milk) — 1900m & 1600m
  • Variety — Geisha (espresso) & Papayo (milk)
  • Process — Nitrogen maceration for 50 hours, dried to 11% moisture (espresso); 60-hour oxidation, 160-hour anaerobic fermentation (milk)
  • Farm — Finca Deborah (espresso) & Finca Zarza (milk)
  • Roaster — UG22

2024 — World Barista Championship, Busan, South Korea (2nd)

Theme. The pursuit of constant improvement in coffee preparation and presentation.

  • Coffee — Volcán, Panama (espresso) & Huila, Colombia (milk) — 1900m & 1500m
  • Variety — Gesha (espresso) & Pacamara (milk)
  • Process — Nitrogen maceration (espresso) & 150-hour anaerobic fermentation with thermal shock (milk)
  • Farm — Finca Deborah (espresso) & Zarza (milk)

2023 — World Barista Championship, Athens, Greece (3rd)

Theme. Innovation, refinement, and adaptation in the specialty coffee industry.

  • Coffee — Huila, Colombia (espresso & milk) at 1,700 meters
  • Variety — Ombligon, a mutation of Caturra
  • Process — Natural process with 72-hour fermentation in bioreactors using mosto and Saccharomyces yeast, followed by 60-hour oxidation in open bags
  • Farm — El Diviso, Nestor Lasso

Footnotes

  1. Axil Coffee Roasters — Jack Simpson wins the 2025 World Barista Championship (official) — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Milan/HOST Milano venue, the 2023 third and 2024 second placings, “Australian Barista Champion for 3 years running,” and the Jamison Savage / Johnathan Gasca producer collaboration ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13

  2. Wikipedia — World Barista Championship (champions table) — confirmed via WebFetch; lists Jack Simpson, Australia, Milan for 2025 ↩ ↩2

  3. Sprudge — “Australia’s Jack Simpson Wins The 2025 World Barista Championship,” 21 October 2025 — headline and publication date seen in Sprudge’s own search listing; the full article was not read ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Axil Coffee Roasters — official site — the 2022/2023/2024 Australian and 2025 world championship badges, the championship tee and the Barista Champion Selection range, as already recorded on Axil Coffee Roasters ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Coffee Magazine — Human Interest: Interview with Jack Simpson — returned HTTP 403 when fetched here; cited via the research report behind this note ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. BeanScene — Jack Simpson wins 2025 ASCA Australian Barista Championship — returned HTTP 403 when fetched here; cited via the research report behind this note ↩

  7. BeanScene — Jack Simpson’s secret weapon — returned HTTP 403 when fetched here; cited via the research report behind this note ↩ ↩2

  8. Finca Deborah — official site — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Volcán, Chiriquí location and the 1,900 m+ elevation, and of the absence of any Jack Simpson mention ↩ ↩2

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