Simple Kaffa

Simple Kaffa (Chinese: 興波咖啡) is a specialty coffee roastery and café group in Taipei, Taiwan, founded by Berg Wu, who won the World Barista Championship in 2016.¹

It matters to this wiki for two reasons that pull in opposite directions. One is a competition result: the world barista title is the single most visible individual prize in coffee, and Simple Kaffa is the business built around Taiwan’s only win. The other is buying power: Simple Kaffa’s name appears in the buyer list for the 2024 Best of Panama record lot — the $10,013-a-kilo Elida Geisha — alongside the Japanese, Korean and Hong Kong roasters who now routinely split the world’s most expensive coffee between them.

A note on the name. Kaffa is the region in southwestern Ethiopia usually named as the birthplace of arabica coffee; the Chinese name 興波 is a phonetic play that reads roughly as “rising wave”. Neither is a technical term — both are branding. An unrelated Oslo roastery, Kaffa, borrowed the same region name.

The company

Attribute	Detail
English name	Simple Kaffa
Chinese name	興波咖啡
Base	Taipei, Taiwan
Flagship address	No. 27, Sec. 2, Zhongxiao E. Rd., Zhongzheng District, Taipei
Founder	Berg Wu — 2016 World Barista Championship winner
Founded	2011 — confirmed by Wu himself
Business	Roastery plus a group of Taipei cafés and kiosks, with retail bagged coffee

The Taipei base, both names, and the flagship address come from the company’s own website, which also advertises a kiosk at the Nangang Exhibition Center and refers back to the World Barista Championship win a decade earlier — the company made a commemorative titanium cup for the anniversary (official site).

To verify

A claimed 88th-floor café that the company’s own site doesn’t list. An Instagram reel places Simple Kaffa at “88F, No. 7, Sec. 5, Xinyi Rd., Xinyi Dist., Taipei City”, tagged @simplekaffa.² That street address is Taipei 101, so the claim is a café on the 88th floor of Taiwan’s tallest building. The homepage fetched here lists only the Zhongxiao E. Rd. flagship and the Nangang kiosk, with no Taipei 101 entry — though it does point to a separate shop list that was not reached. Social-media location tags are not evidence of a permanent site; this may be a pop-up, a past residency, or simply wrong. Also note: an “88F” café is building height, not growing altitude — nothing to do with the metres-above-sea-level figures elsewhere in this wiki.

The 2011 founding year is now settled at the source. In an interview republished on Simple Kaffa’s own site, Wu says plainly: “We started our coffee shop in 2011 but it didn’t go well in the first year”.³ That matches every independent write-up consulted, including the green-coffee platform TYPICA’s interview-based profile and Unpacking Coffee’s roaster directory.⁴⁵ Wu also calls it “my coffee shop” in the same interview, and Sprudge reported him from the 2016 championship floor as “Berg Wu of Simple Kaffa”.⁶

An earlier version of this note flagged a figure rendered as “Boss-Louis / 路老闆” as possibly occupying the founder position on the company homepage. That is resolved: the name sits in the page footer as a site-design credit, not as an ownership claim.¹

To verify

Ownership structure, and a stray co-founder claim. No source consulted states the legal ownership structure (sole proprietor, company, share split); they say only that this is Wu’s shop. Do not describe him as the 100% owner. Separately, a travel video on YouTube says Simple Kaffa was founded by “Chee Lu and world champion barista Berg Wu”.⁷ Nothing on the company’s own site, in Sprudge’s reporting, or in any roaster profile consulted names a second founder. Treat the co-founder claim as unsupported.

Berg Wu and the 2016 world title

Berg Wu won the World Barista Championship in Dublin, Ireland, on 25 June 2016 — the first and, through 2025, still the only champion from Taiwan, and the 17th person to hold the title since the championship began in 2000.⁶⁸ He was the second Asian winner, after Japan’s Hidenori Izaki in 2014.

A barista championship is not a coffee-tasting contest. Competitors have 15 minutes to serve four espressos, four milk drinks and four signature drinks to a panel of judges, and are scored on the drinks, on technical hygiene and workflow, and on the presentation itself — including how well they explain the coffee’s origin and processing. National champions qualify for the world round. Winning it is a career event: it moves a roaster from local to internationally sourced overnight, which is roughly what happened here.

To verify

How big the field was. A Singapore event video says Wu “beat out competitors from 60 countries”.⁹ Promotional video is the weakest kind of source for a countable fact, and no official participant list for the 2016 championship was reachable here. The number is plausible for that era of the competition but is not confirmed.

The rest of Wu’s biography is consistently but thinly sourced. Roaster profiles describe an engineering background — a master’s in engineering from National Taiwan University and a stint as an electronics engineer — a coffee tricycle selling in Taipei neighbourhoods such as Jingmei and Gongguan, placings in the Taiwan Barista Championship from 2009 onward, and two earlier trips to the world stage in 2014 and 2015 before the win.¹⁰¹¹ One profile also has him watching the 2008 championship in Denmark and deciding then that he would compete one day¹⁰ — the date is at least internally consistent, since the 2008 final was indeed held in Copenhagen (see World Barista Championship).

The shape of that record is what makes the world title less of a surprise than it looks. You do not enter the world round directly — you have to win your own country first, and Wu was a repeat Taiwan Barista Championship winner before Dublin, reaching the world stage in 2014 and 2015 and converting on the third attempt. The exact years of the national wins are where the sources stop agreeing.

To verify

The Taiwan Barista Championship years don’t line up between sources. TYPICA reports Wu taking third place in 2012 and then first place in three consecutive years, 2013 to 2015 — while Day9 says only that he “placed at the Taiwan Barista Championship from 2009 onward” (both).⁴¹⁰ These are not flatly contradictory — early placings and later wins can both be true — but neither is a primary record, the TYPICA page returned HTTP 403 when fetched here and is cited via the research report, and no official Taiwan Barista Championship results table was reachable. Note also the arithmetic problem: three consecutive national wins in 2013, 2014 and 2015 would normally mean world-round appearances in those same years, yet the profiles place him on the world stage in 2014 and 2015 only. Do not present a year-by-year national record as settled.

To verify

When the coffee tricycle started — 2004 or 2009. Day9 says Wu launched it in 2004 while still working as an engineer; Rikkafika says 2009 (both).¹⁰¹² The gap is five years and the two accounts cannot both be literally right. The likeliest reconciliation is that one date marks a weekend side project and the other the point it became a regular business, but nothing consulted here says so. Neither date is confirmed by a primary record.

The championship coffee: a washed Geisha from Finca Deborah

Earlier versions of this note carried this as an unverified claim resting on a single blog. It is now confirmed from both ends — the event reporting and the competitor himself.

Sprudge, reporting from Dublin on the day, wrote that “Berg Wu competed at the event using a Geisha variety coffee grown at Finca Deborah, a coffee farm located in the Volcan region of Panama”.⁶ Wu himself, in the interview republished on his own site, is more specific still: “The coffee I used is a 2015/2016 crop of washed Geisha from Finca Deborah, Panama”.³ He describes it as honey-like and floral with a long, lingering finish.

Three things follow that are worth stating plainly:

• The variety was Geisha — the aromatic, jasmine-and-citrus variety that also sets the price records at Best of Panama.
• The processing was washed — the fruit is stripped off the bean before drying, the cleanest and least interventionist of the main methods. Notably not one of the natural or fermented processes that dominate competition routines a decade later.
• The crop year was 2015/2016 — a fresh harvest, taken to the stage within months of picking.

Finca Deborah does match the description independently: its own site places it in Volcán, at 1,900 m and above, “one of the highest and most remote coffee farms in all of Panama”, growing Geisha exclusively.¹³

To verify

The farm has never claimed the win, and the lot has no name. Finca Deborah’s own website does not mention Berg Wu, Simple Kaffa, Taiwan or the 2016 championship anywhere — which is odd for a farm whose coffee won the sport’s biggest title. No lot name, altitude for the specific lot, cupping score or price appears in any source consulted, and the event’s own technical sheets are not publicly browsable. So: variety, processing and crop year are solid; everything more granular is not.

As a buyer

Simple Kaffa’s name appears in the buyer list for the coffee that held the world price record: the 2024 Best of Panama winning Elida Geisha Natural “Torre” from Elida Estate, the Lamastus family farm in Boquete, which sold at **10,013 per kilogram** — 20 kg for over 200,000.

The bid was fronted by Saza Coffee of Japan, which then split the lot. The published list of co-buyers includes “Pebble Coffee for Simple Kaffa”, alongside Grand Cru Coffee of Hong Kong, OKLAO Specialty Coffee, BREW BOYY CREW, Ruber.Roastery, Paradise Coffee Roasters and Ruliweb of South Korea.¹⁴

Year	Auction	Lot	Price	Simple Kaffa’s role
2024	Best of Panama	Elida Geisha Natural “Torre” (20 kg)	10,013/kg (≈ 4,542/lb)	Named in the co-buyer list, via Pebble Coffee; lot fronted by Saza Coffee

Read that row carefully. A buying consortium — explained in full on its own note — means several roasters agree in advance to split one 20 kg bag and the bill, with one of them placing the bid. Being named does not mean Simple Kaffa paid $200,260, or any large share of it. Its actual outlay, and the size of its slice, are not published.

To verify

The 2024 purchase now has more than one outlet behind it, but still no official record — and Simple Kaffa has never confirmed it. The co-buyer list is published in identical form by three outlets: the Panama write-up first consulted here,¹⁴ Food & Wine,¹⁵ and the trade publication CoffeeTalk.¹⁶ Identical wording and ordering suggests a single underlying auction communication rather than three independent counts, and official Best of Panama buyer tables for 2024 remain unbrowsable; LatAm Reports covered the same lot naming only Saza Coffee.¹⁷ On the phrase “Pebble Coffee for Simple Kaffa”: Pebble Coffee is now confirmed to be a specialty coffee company based in Taipei, the same city as Simple Kaffa, describing itself as a green-coffee importer.¹⁸ That makes the agent-or-importer reading much the most likely one — but neither company states the relationship in its own words, and Simple Kaffa has still not been found confirming the purchase at all.

To verify

No auction wins, no published scores. Simple Kaffa does not appear as a producer, winner or finalist in any consulted results table from Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, the Alliance for Coffee Excellence or the Coffee Quality Institute — which is expected for a roaster, not a farm — and no numeric cupping score for any Simple Kaffa coffee appears in anything consulted here. Do not attach a score to its lots.

Sourcing and roasting

What can be said with reasonable confidence is the shape of the buying: competition-grade lots, heavy on Geisha from Panama’s Volcán and Boquete districts, with additional top lots from Ethiopia, Colombia and Kenya, and a stated insistence on full traceability and documentation for each lot.¹¹ The roasting is described as light and precision-oriented — aiming at clarity, sweetness and structure rather than the darker, roastier profile of a mass-market café.¹⁹

A concrete example of the retail range: a Light Roasted Ethiopia Guji “Honey Selection” with tasting notes of floral honey, red pomelo and honey-scented black tea.²⁰ The name implies honey processing — where the sticky fruit layer is left on the bean during drying — but the listing does not say so outright, and gives no farm, altitude or washing station.

To verify

Store count, equipment and production claims — all from retail copy. Reported but not independently confirmed: seven Taipei locations each with a distinct concept, and a flagship deliberately hidden in a basement beneath a select shop⁵; a staff of “almost thirty” about ten years in⁴; an offsite Diedrich 5 kg roaster, a La Marzocco GB5 espresso machine and Mahlkönig EK43 grinders¹⁰; and the use of optical colour sorters and nitrogen flushing of bags for freshness.¹²²¹ The last pair is not two independent sources — both read as restatements of the roaster’s own marketing. Retail footprints also go stale within months; treat “several Taipei locations” as the safe version.

To verify

The “world’s 50 best coffee shops” ranking. Simple Kaffa’s own homepage says a well-known travel site ranked it first in Taiwan on a “world’s 50 best coffee shops” list,¹ and several roaster directories repeat that it appears often on best-café rankings. The awarding publication, the year and the methodology are not named on the page, and no independent copy of the ranking was located here. This is self-reported marketing until the original list is found.

The team

Simple Kaffa is described by both TYPICA and Day9 as an unusually competition-dense staff — a house that trains baristas to compete and has produced several Taiwan Barista Championship title-holders, including the two-time champion Zoe Lai. Exact years and exact titles (barista championship versus brewers cup, which are separate competitions with different rules) are not enumerated in any source consulted, so nothing more specific is stated here.

Why it belongs in this wiki

Most of the buyers in these notes reach the top of the market through money alone. Simple Kaffa reached it through a competition result first — the world barista title in 2016 — and only then became a name on record auction bid sheets. That sequence is the East Asian specialty pattern in miniature, and it is the same one visible in Saza Coffee, Grand Cru Coffee and across the China coffee market: a dense concentration of trained palates and competition culture, a small and wealthy top end, and a willingness to pay per-gram prices for coffee that will be sold by the cup. See Premiumisation for how that end of the market works, and Klatch Coffee for what the same lot looks like when it reaches a customer.

Related

• Berg Wu · World Barista Championship · Zoe Lai · World Brewers Cup
• Best of Panama · Best of Panama results archive · Elida Estate · Wilford Lamastus · Finca Deborah
• Saza Coffee — fronted the 2024 lot Simple Kaffa shared · Grand Cru Coffee · Pebble Coffee · Klatch Coffee · Julith Coffee · JD.com
• Geisha · Honey process · Natural process · Coffee scoring · Cupping · Q Grader
• Premiumisation · China coffee market · Specialty Coffee Association

Official links

• Official site — Simple Kaffa (興波咖啡)
• Official — Simple Kaffa journal: Berg Wu on his 2016 championship coffee

Footnotes

1. Simple Kaffa — official site ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Instagram — @simplekaffa reel tagged 88F, Xinyi Rd., Taipei ↩

3. Simple Kaffa journal — “World Barista Champion Berg Wu: The Sprudge Interview” (official site) ↩ ↩²

4. TYPICA — Simple Kaffa: “An elite group that continues to create a new trend” ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Unpacking Coffee — Simple Kaffa roaster directory entry ↩ ↩²

6. Sprudge — Berg Wu of Taiwan wins the 2016 World Barista Championship ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. YouTube — “Sipping Coffee at Taiwan’s Sky-High Café!”, Anything Goes With JL ↩

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

9. YouTube — “World Barista Champion Berg Wu in Singapore” ↩

10. Day9 — Simple Kaffa roaster profile ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

11. Morning Wines — Simple Kaffa roaster wiki ↩ ↩²

12. Rikkafika — Simple Kaffa ↩ ↩²

13. Finca Deborah — official site ↩

14. Casa Solution — $4,500 a pound for Boquete coffee? Yes, really (2024 buyer list) ↩ ↩²

15. Food & Wine — the most expensive coffee beans in the world come from Panama ↩

16. CoffeeTalk — This coffee just set a new world record, selling at $10,013 per kilogram ↩

17. LatAm Reports — Geisha: Panama’s luxury coffee sets new price record ↩

18. Coffee Review — Tanzania Shiwanda Estate Peaberry, Pebble Coffee (roaster located Taipei, Taiwan) ↩

19. The Way to Coffee — Simple Kaffa ↩

20. Every.coffee — Light Roasted Ethiopia Guji / Honey Selection, Simple Kaffa ↩

21. Every.coffee — Simple Kaffa roaster page ↩