What a rollercoaster three weeks it has been! From a field of 32, our Ultimate Coffee Bracket Challenge pitted the worldโ€™s most popular coffee drinks against one another in head-to-head matchups Thunderdome styleโ€”two drinks enter, one drink leavesโ€”until only one coffee beverage reigned supreme. And the last battle was one for the ages: Espresso, the one seed, titan of the coffee bar, squaring off against the seventh seed V60. But when the dust settled, it was the V60 holding the slingshot, vanquishing all foes on the way to the title.

Here’s how the 2021 bracket shook out:

Obviously, we all feel many emotions about this whole tournamentโ€”speaking them aloud is helping, frankly, and given the volume of trash talk and hot takes the project evoked, you certainly seem to agree. So as an epilogue to what truly has been a very fun and very silly journey, weโ€™ve compiled some of our favorite comments that came out of the Sprudge Ultimate Coffee Bracket Challenge.

Many of your takes fell somewhere along the Five Stages of Grief

Denial:

coco

Anger:

ollie

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foul mouthed

Bargaining:

dccoffee

Depression:

coco

Acceptance:

glitter

This one got Hario USA asking me if I wanted to throw hands!

zaccad

Then there were the folks who either don’t understand how brackets work or just don’t like fun:

jfu

batchy

cbtacy

Here’s my take: Iโ€™ll grant that Espresso was the one seed for a reason. Itโ€™s a cafe staple, a crucial building block upon which many other beloved coffee drinks are constructed. But there seems to be a lot of convenient misremembering of how often you get a truly great espresso. In fact, the best espresso Iโ€™ve had in the past few years was a ristretto, a drink that should have lost in the first round to the far superiorย Cร  Phรช Sแปฏa Dรก.

But thatโ€™s all forgivable, if not just a touch boring. There are always going to be people who root for Duke or Tom Brady or the Yankees; front runners gonna front run. What I cannot abide, however, is what yโ€™all did to the Iced Vanilla Latte. In no imaginable world is the Siphon better. I can count of zero fingers the number of times Iโ€™ve had a siphon that was anything beyond โ€œgood for a siphon.โ€ I have, in the entirety of my existence, never had a single bad iced vanilla latte.

We have more takesโ€”especially around why Chemex lost in the Final Fourโ€”but let’s leave it here, and allow the beefs to live on until next season. Thanks again for tuning in for the Sprudge Ultimate Coffee Bracket. We had too much fun not to do it again in 2022.

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

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