History of the World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship (WCIGS)

The World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship (WCIGS) is an annual international competition in which licensed national champions — professional baristas and bartenders — combine coffee with alcohol to create original beverages, judged on taste, technical skill, and presentation.

It is one of the seven disciplines under the World Coffee Championships umbrella, alongside the World Barista Championship, the World Brewers Cup, the World Latte Art Championship, the World Cup Tasters Championship, the World Coffee Roasting Championship, and the Cezve/Ibrik Championship.

Competitors must prepare an Irish Coffee and an original coffee-and-alcohol cocktail, positioning WCIGS as the only World Coffee Championship discipline built around mixology rather than pure espresso extraction or roasting craft.

History and Origins

Coffee in Good Spirits began in 2005, created by the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) to broaden its competition roster beyond the World Barista Championship and the World Cup Tasters Championship.

Coffee competition organizer Sonja Grant states that the discipline was designed both to connect baristas with bartending and to preserve the original recipe of Irish Coffee, which organizers felt was being diluted by unconventional variations. That preservation goal remains embedded in the competition’s final-round requirement that competitors produce a traditional Irish Coffee alongside an original creation.

For its first several years, the championship operated primarily as a European event under SCAE governance, drawing competitors mainly from the continent.

Establishment of the Championship

The competition’s global expansion accelerated in 2011, when World Coffee Events (WCE) took over ownership of Coffee in Good Spirits from SCAE. WCE, founded through cooperation between the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe and the Specialty Coffee Association of America, folded WCIGS into its wider portfolio of licensed world championships. This transfer widened participation to competitors from Australia, Asia, and Latin America, though the championship’s European roots remained visible for years afterward.

The United States did not field a national Coffee in Good Spirits competition until the 2018–19 season, a delay attributed to the complexity of navigating differing state liquor laws across the country. The U.S. Coffee in Good Spirits Championship debuted at a qualifying event in Denver in December 2017, won by Sam Schroeder of Olympia Coffee Roasting.

Organizing Body and Purpose

WCIGS is organized by the World Coffee Championships (WCC) program, operated under the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), formed in 2017 through the unification of the SCAE and the Specialty Coffee Association of America. The competition’s stated purpose is to showcase the intersection of barista craft and mixology, encouraging competitors to demonstrate quality ingredient selection, technical execution, balance, and creativity in coffee-and-alcohol beverages.

Competitors qualify by winning a sanctioned national Coffee in Good Spirits championship organized by a WCE-licensed Competition Body in their home country.

Competition Format and Rules

The WCIGS format is divided into a preliminary round and a final round. In the preliminary round, competitors first appear at the WCIGS Spirit Bar, where they prepare two coffee-and-alcohol drinks built around a randomly assigned spirit or ingredient. They then move to the main competition stage, where they produce four drinks: two identical hot or warm coffee-and-alcohol beverages and two identical cold coffee-and-alcohol beverages.

The six highest-scoring competitors from the preliminary round advance to the final round, where each must prepare two Irish Coffees and two original coffee-and-alcohol designer cocktails. The competitor with the highest final-round score is named World Coffee in Good Spirits Champion.

Competitors may use any coffee and brew method they choose, adjusting grind size and dosing to suit each cocktail’s character, provided the required spirit is present in sufficient quantity to be perceptible in the finished drink. Rules and regulations are reviewed and updated annually by WCC’s Competitions Strategic Committee; the 2026 edition, for example, clarified on-stage conduct terms and redefined permissible ingredients to include ice.

Judging Criteria and Scoring System

Certified WCIGS judges evaluate competitors on the quality and balance of ingredients — described using sensory vocabulary consistent with the coffee flavor wheel — technical execution, hospitality and presentation, creativity, and overall sensory impact of each drink. Separate scoresheets apply to the Spirit Bar, main-stage preliminary drinks, and final-round Irish Coffee and designer cocktail, reflecting the competition’s dual demands of technical coffee preparation and cocktail craftsmanship.

Judges undergo calibration training to standardize evaluation of flavor balance, drink temperature, visual presentation, and competitor communication with the judging panel throughout each timed routine.

Championship Categories

Within the broader World Coffee Championships portfolio, WCIGS occupies a distinct category focused on beverage innovation through spirits pairing, differentiating it from the espresso-and-milk focus of the World Barista Championship, the manual filter-brewing focus of the World Brewers Cup, the roast-profiling emphasis of the World Coffee Roasting Championship, and the cupping-based sensory-discrimination testing of the World Cup Tasters Championship.

Within WCIGS itself, competitors are assessed across two drink categories in every round: a mandatory hot or warm preparation (culminating in the Irish Coffee in the final) and a cold preparation, each requiring distinct techniques for balancing alcohol, temperature, and coffee extraction.

Qualification Process

Every competition year, one competitor from each WCE-licensed Competition Body advances to the WCIGS world stage by winning their respective national Coffee in Good Spirits championship. Competition Bodies operate in more than 60 countries, each running its own qualifying events under WCC-sanctioned rules. A Deferred Candidacy policy allows a national champion facing a qualifying circumstance beyond their control to defer their place to the following year without forfeiting eligibility, ensuring continuity of representation for each Competition Body.

Past Winners

The table below lists confirmed World Coffee in Good Spirits Champions from the competition’s founding through 2025. Records for the SCAE-administered years of 2005–2011 are not consistently documented in publicly accessible sources, reflecting the competition’s smaller, Europe-focused scale during that period. The championship was not held in 2020 or 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

➡ 2026 2026 World Coffee in Good Spirits Championship

Notable Milestones and Records

Dan Fellows of the United Kingdom became the first back-to-back World Coffee in Good Spirits Champion, winning consecutively in 2018 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and 2019 in Berlin, Germany. Agnieszka Rojewska of Poland, the 2022 WCIGS Champion, is also the first woman to win the World Barista Championship, having claimed that title in 2018, making her one of the few competitors to hold champion titles in two separate World Coffee Championships disciplines.

The Underdog, an Athens-based coffee company, produced three separate WCIGS winners across the 2010s through George Koustoumpardis (2015) and Michalis Dimitrakopoulos (2016), reflecting a period of Greek dominance in the discipline. The 2020 and 2021 editions were canceled entirely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, making Dan Fellows’s 2019 title the longest-standing reign in the championship’s history, spanning three years until Agnieszka Rojewska’s win in 2022.

Champion routines have also pushed the technical boundaries of coffee sourcing and preparation within the discipline. Matthew Perger’s 2014 winning Irish Coffee used three shots of espresso filtered to avoid crema, a departure from the traditional filter-brewed base. Michalis Dimitrakopoulos built his 2016 title run around a high-altitude, natural-processed Ethiopian single-origin coffee, while other finalists have leaned on rare Geisha lots from named estate coffee farms, such as Los Lajones in Panama, to headline their designer cocktails — reflecting the same origin-transparency standards that define competitive coffee sourcing across the World Coffee Championships.

Impact on the Coffee Industry

WCIGS has functioned as a driver of menu innovation for cafés seeking to expand beyond traditional espresso-based offerings into coffee cocktails, a category that supports additional revenue streams during slower afternoon and evening trading hours. The competition has also served as a proving ground connecting the specialty coffee and craft cocktail industries, with sponsor partnerships from major spirits producers supplying randomly assigned ingredients for the Spirit Bar round.

Winning recipes and techniques from WCIGS finalists have circulated through industry publications and training programs, influencing coffee cocktail menus at competition-adjacent cafés, roasteries, and bars internationally, and reinforcing the practice of building a cocktail’s identity around a single coffee’s terroir rather than treating it as a background ingredient.

Evolution and Future Developments

Since its 2011 transition to World Coffee Events oversight, WCIGS has broadened its geographic footprint considerably, with recent editions held in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Taiwan, Denmark, and Switzerland. The 2026 edition marked a structural shift, taking place concurrently with the World Brewers Cup and World Coffee Roasting Championship at World of Coffee Brussels, a scheduling change from the historically staggered format used in prior years.

Rules updates in recent cycles have also expanded permissible on-stage ingredients and refined appeals processes, reflecting ongoing efforts by the WCC Competitions Strategic Committee to standardize judging consistency across the seven World Coffee Championships disciplines.

See Also

• History of the World Latte Art Championship (WLAC)
• History of the World Barista Championship (WBC)
• History of the Cezve/Ibrik Championship (CIC)
• History of the World Brewers Cup (WBrC)
• History of the World Cup Tasters Championship
• History of the World Coffee Roasting Championship (WCRC)

References

1. World Coffee Championships (wcc.coffee) — official WCIGS competition rules and event pages
2. Specialty Coffee Association (sca.coffee) — competition governance and history
3. Barista Magazine Online (baristamagazine.com) — “A Spirited Competition” series on CIGS history
4. Sprudge (sprudge.com) — annual World Coffee Championships results coverage
5. Daily Coffee News (dailycoffeenews.com) — World Coffee Championships results coverage
6. Perfect Daily Grind (perfectdailygrind.com) — WCIGS champion performance recaps
7. BeanScene Magazine (beanscenemag.com.au) — WCIGS champion profiles
8. Comunicaffe International (comunicaffe.com) — World Coffee Championships results reporting
9. U.S. Coffee Championships (uscoffeechampionships.org) — U.S. Coffee in Good Spirits Championship records
10. Qahwa World (qahwaworld.com) — Taipei World Coffee Championships results coverage
11. Fresh Cup Magazine (freshcup.com) — World Coffee Championships winner profiles
12. Global Coffee Report (gcrmag.com) — World Coffee Championships event scheduling coverage