Not to get ahead of ourselves here, because there’s still a whole US Coffee Championships next month to get through, but the World Coffee Championships is just around the corner in June. Taking place in Athens, Greece, the first of the 2023 events will crown four new World Coffee Champions.
In a statement released Thursday, March 9th by the Specialty Coffee Association, the four competitions will take place June 21st through 24th as part of World of Coffee Athens, the SCA’s premier global trade show event. An anticipated 140 national champions will head to Greece to compete in the World Barista Championship, World Brewers Cup, World Cup Tasters Championship, and the World Cezve/Ibrik Championship.
This year’s World of Coffee will be premiering some rather significant changes to the SCA’s two premier competitions, the Barista Championship and the Brewers Cup. For the WBrC, a semi-final round has been introduced as well as overall “changes to evaluation criteria to refocus on evaluating a competitor’s coffee brewing skills.” And perhaps most notably, the rules for the WBC have been changed to allow competitor to use their choice of milk for their milk beverage course; until this year—and even still in many national levels of competition—cow’s milk has been mandatory.
We’re just three short months away from crowing the first four World Coffee Champions of 2023. The remaining three—World Coffee in Good Spirits, World Latte Art, and World Roasting Championship—will be decided later in November in Taipei, Taiwan. For more information, visit World of Coffee’s official website.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
