The top three finishers from the 2018 World Coffee Roasting Championship, from left to right:Veda Viraswami, Vladimir Nenashev and Yoshiyuki Nakamura. Photo courtesy of World Coffee Events.
Not a moment too soon, the results of the 2018 World Coffee Roasting Championship are in. The top three finishers were Vladimir Nenashev of Mosaic Coffee in Russia (1st), Yoshiyuki Nakamura of Mamepolepole in Japan (2nd) and Veda Viraswami of Le Café Alain Ducasse in France (3rd), according to event organizer World Coffee Events.
Twenty-three WCRC national champions competed in this year’s event, which took place over the past four days in conjunction with the Sigep show in Rimini, Italy. The WCRC was originally scheduled to take place in Dubai this year, before the Specialty Coffee Association announced its intention to relocate all Dubai world championship events.
WCRC judges. Photo courtesy of World Coffee Events.
This year’s global competition involved three stages, including pre-roasting and green coffee evaluation, a production roasting stage designed to follow each competitor’s roasting plan, and a sensory evaluation stage, in which a group of calibrated judges performed a “double blind” cupping of the coffees.
Remarkably, Nenashev’s winning score of 486.25 reflected the third highest differential between all the final scores. The 2018 U.S. champion, Ian Picco of Topeca Coffee, placed 18th among the world’s national champions.
Event organizer World Coffee Events said the 2019 WCRC will take place near the end of the 2019 calendar year. Here are the complete standings from the 2018 event, courtesy of WCE:
Nick Brown
Nick Brown is the editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.
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