James Hoffmann is the winner of the 2025 Sprudge Ultimate Coffee Bracket Challenge. A World Barista Champion and co-founder of Square Mile Coffee, Hoffmann is perhaps best known here in 2025 as a content creator (or at least that’s probably how his 2.3 millions subscribers on YouTube and 700K more on Instagram might know him). He’s an influencer, in modern parlance, and the most popular one, as the Semi-Final round of Bracketsprology showed us, where he beat Morgan Eckroth by a 3:1 margin. It was a route.
And what we can now confirm one other fact from the outcome of this year’s tournament: James Hoffmann is more popular than coffee itself.
But it was a close one. In the final matchup, against the coffee drinks bracket champion, the V60, Hoffmann won by the slimmest of margins. Just 50 votes separated the two. This was the second closest contest in Bracketsprology history, behind only the Round One bout this year, where Iced Americano best Mocha by just eight votes. (I’m still not over how dirty y’all did Mocha. Shame!)
Now, like Dr. Frankenstein, we must reckon with the monster of our own creation. There are a lot of ways to interpret the win. There are some who thought the entire conceit of the Finals was totally cringe, pitting a human versus a drink in a popularity contest. To which I would say, please, chill out. They’re influencers who chose to put themselves in the public eye and whose entire livelihood is literally a popularity contest. I think they’ll be fine.
But assuming you don’t hate fun, you probably picked a side and you saw this one of two ways. You saw this, like Wrecking Ball’s Trish Rothgeb did, as a battle of human versus inanimate object. Of Man versus Machine, the entire conceit around which entire American folklore legends have been built. Or, you saw this as a battle between a thing in the real world versus its online simulacrum. As coffee versus coffee influencer and all the brainrotted moral decay implied therein. All of this to say, it doesn’t matter which side you were on, the stakes couldn’t have been higher.
And Hoffmann beat their brains out. I’ll leave it up to you to pontificate on who silly or profound or profoundly silly it all is.
That’s a wrap on the 2025 Sprudge Ultimate Coffee Bracket Challenge. Thanks for tuning in and being part of the half-million votes we received over the two weeks. We’ll be back next March for more thrilling coffee matchups, more stunning upsets, more Bracketsprology.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
