Who’s ready for some raucous coffee good times? After a successful run in The States, the Barista League is heading back home to Scandinavia for the 2019 season, with the inaugural event taking place Satuday, January 26th at Koppi in Helsingborg, Sweden. For this season, the Barista League has turned an eye toward social and environmental accountability, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be any less of a wild coffee party.
Like with previous events, Barista League Helsingborg will feature teams of two being put through the veritable coffee ringer, duking it out across three events: “a drink menu challenge on the brand new Rancilio Specialty machine using Oatly’s iKaffe, a sensory round of matching coffees, and a mystery round that is so secret the only thing we can say is that it features Baratza grinders.” The twelve duos will be scrutinized under the watchful eyes of judges 2016 World Brewers Cup runner-up Mikaela Gervard (The Coffee Collective), Icelandic Latte Art and Coffee in Good Spirits champion Vala Stefansdottir (Kaffi Kvörn), and Kore Directive founder Sierra Burgess-Yeo (featured here on Sprudge). The winning team at all of this year’s events will take home a yet-unnamed grand prize that the Barista League promises to be pretty wild. This is from the event series that sent the US winners to origin last year, so when they say the prize is going to be something special, I’m inclined to believe them.
Newish for this year—it was demoed in Oslo last year—is the Barista League brew bar, where the expected “200+ partying coffee professionals” in attendance will have the chance to hop behind the counter to test drive all the competition machines and test their skills at the gauntlet of challenges awaiting the competitors.
In an effort to have a positive impact on the coffee community globally as well as hold themselves accountable, the Barista League has implemented a few key functional changes for 2019. According to the press release, all ticket proceeds from the Helsingborg even will go to Grounds for Health, a non-profit organization working to reduce incidents of cervical cancer in coffee producing countries. Additionally, the Barista League is taking the rather unheard of step (at least as far as coffee events go) of publishing environmental impact reports from all the 2019 events “in an effort to focus more attention on how we consume materials at events.”
Tickets for the Barista League Helsingborg event are 80.00 KR ($8.80 USD) and are available for purchase here. It all gets started at 5:30pm at Koppi. For more information, visit the Barista League’s official website. Coffee party GO!
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
Top image via the Barista League
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Source: Coffee News
