This weekend the first Danish Brewers Cup was held. It’s a competition focusing on black coffee. The past years we’ve seen an growing interest in different types of filtered coffee. From regular drip brewers, over Clover, to Siphon, Aeropress, V60, Woodneck, Chemex and on and on. Each of these can present interesting aspects of a given coffee, but it also seems like there are some clear favourite darlings in the specialty coffee world at the moment.

The Brewers Cup competition is a venue to explore all these brew methods. In the first round all baristas must use the same coffee, which they are handed a few hours before and allowed to experiment with to find it’s optimal brew method or recipe. This is judged purely on taste. If they make it to the finals, they get to use their own coffee and present it to the judges. It’s judges 70% on taste and 30% on presentation.

3 of the 4 competitors (3 people had signed up but didn’t show up) in the Danish Championship had chosen the exact same coffee (although different roast dates): Our Kieni from Kenya ! They didn’t realise this until the competition began. Hurrah we say!

In the end our barista Torfi took the victory. He’s a chef by education and has worked at some of the best restaurants in Iceland and Denmark, including Ensemble and Umami. Last summer he decided his enthusiasm for coffee was bigger than his need to work in gourmet kitchens and he came to work for us. He’s been cupping a lot lately and been experimenting a lot with dialing in the coffees. It paid off.

Huge congratulations to Torfi from the rest of the collective!

And good luck in Maastricht!