Actually, Martin Wölfl, managing director of Wildkaffee 2.0 and 25GRAMS , was close to never taking part in competitions again. After finishing second to last at the 2023 World Championships in Athens, he thought about quitting competing. But after many years of hard work, he decided that this should not be the end. So he formed the perfect team around himself to compete one last time in Chicago on April 14, 2024. Success was anything but certain and therefore a combination of many components. And then he won the world championship title!
41 filter coffee experts from all over the world competed in the World Brewers Cup at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Chicago, including Martin Wölfl from Wildkaffee Austria, who represented Austria. Our representative from Vienna reached 7th place with 324 points in the preliminary round and thus qualified for the semi-finals. The eleven other semi-finalists included Charity Cheung for France, Alex Niculae for Romania and Kim Dongmin for South Korea. Participants from Indonesia, Japan, Australia, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Taiwan, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates also reached the semi-finals.
World Brewers Cup – 3rd place in the semi-finals
A trend was already apparent for Martin Wölfl in the semi-finals. After finishing 7th in the preliminary round, he came 3rd in the semi-finals. The managing director of Wildkaffee Austria went into the finals together with Wataru Iidaka, Ryan Wibawa, Charity Cheung, Tom Hutchins and Jackie Trang. There he convinced the jury with his filter coffee recipe and won the title of world champion with 481 points.
World Brewers Cup – The World Champion Coffee
The coffee beans for the World Champion Coffee come from Mario and Margot Guillen's Finca Maya in Alto Jaramillo. These beans are then transported overnight to Panama City by the processors, Lost Origin Coffee Lab Panama , where they are disinfected, cooled and subjected to a two-stage fermentation. First they are fermented with wine yeast and then with lactobacilli. The cherries are then dried at low temperatures in filtered air for 33 days.
World Brewers Cup – The World Champion Recipe
Martin brewed 17 grams of these coffee beans with 270 milliliters of water to claim the win. The beans were freshly roasted on a Nucleus Coffee Tools Link Roaster just 7 days before the competition. This and five other innovations helped to present a "completely new taste experience." These six innovations included:
- Using coffee processed by Lost Origins Coffee Labs
- The specially mixed water with minerals from Apax
- Roasting the beans on the Link Roaster from Nucleus Coffee Tools
- The new Dripper V4 from Orea
- The filter paper used by Sibarist
- The cups used by 2-WayCup
Martin Wölfl also emphasized that grinding the coffee beans on stage contributed to the victory. "As baristas, we always grind the coffee fresh, and we don't normally do that on stage. Something gets lost, freshly ground coffee always tastes better," he emphasized.
World Brewers Cup – Aftermath
Martin Wölfl has undoubtedly become a sought-after personality in the industry, and rightly so. After two victories at the Brewers Cup at national level and participation in the 2022 World Championships in Australia and 2023 in Greece, he has continued to improve his technique, revised his processes and, of course, selected an excellent coffee with an ingenious recipe. He is definitely world champion material. "I may be alone on stage, but the whole thing is the result of great teamwork. Be it my trainer, Janine de Laar, who accompanied me the whole time, or the support of Hardi Wild and Wildkaffee as well as the Nucleus Coffee Tools premises, which I was allowed to use. I couldn't have done it alone, it was teamwork. Thanks to everyone who helped me achieve this goal," said Martin Wölfl.
He has now received hundreds of messages from all over the world: many congratulating him, but also many who would like to work with him or interview him. Even the ORF has already made inquiries.
