World Brewers Cup 2025 rules and regulations updated

The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) has updated the rules and regulations for the 2025 World Brewers Cup.

This is the second rules and regulations release of the 2025 World Coffee Championships (WCC) season and applies to the World Brewers Cup event which takes place at World of Coffee tradeshow in Jakarta, Indonesia, from 15 to 17 May, and sanctioned Competition Body events around the world.

In tandem with the updates to the World Coffee Roasting Championship (WCRC), the World Brewers Cup updates are centred on clarifications and formalisation of existing practices in logistics, judging, and administration.

Some key logistics updates include clarification on service vessels and cupping spoons for competitors that choose to use or provide their own, details on spraying water prior to grinding, and the status of kettles between setup and competition time, as well as some adjustments to the format to better accommodate the substantial increase in competitor numbers over the past three years.

Judging and evaluation updates include a provision for head judges to taste open service samples during backstage deliberation, clarification to the logic of aroma evaluation when competitors override it, changes to how ‘astringency’ is categorised, and changes to the scale used by the head judge in workflow and technical uniformity.

Administration changes introduce new processes for competitor registration, and appeals at both Competition Body and world-level in line with the WCRC updates.

Updates to the rules and regulations are overseen by the WCC Competitions Strategic Committee. The rules documents, summaries of changes, scoresheets, and new appeals form are now available at the new website for the World Coffee Championships.