Not to get ahead of ourselves here, because thereโ€™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 SCAโ€™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.

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wcc athens

This yearโ€™s World of Coffee will be premiering some rather significant changes to the SCAโ€™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 โ€œchanges to evaluation criteria to refocus on evaluating a competitorโ€™s coffee brewing skills.โ€ 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 yearโ€”and even still in many national levels of competitionโ€”cowโ€™s milk has been mandatory.

We’re just three short months away from crowing the first four World Coffee Champions of 2023. The remaining threeโ€”World Coffee in Good Spirits, World Latte Art, and World Roasting Championshipโ€”will be decided later in November in Taipei, Taiwan. For more information, visit World of Coffee’s official website.

Zac Cadwaladerย is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas.ย Read more Zac Cadwaladerย on Sprudge.