Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Volume 7 of B.H. Magazine, order your copy now.
The routine lasts just fifteen minutes, but it took Jack Simpson ten months to perfect.
In the windowless backstage of Host Milan, Australia’s barista champion steadied himself for a final performance, delivering what he hoped would be the best cup of coffee in the world. His mind traced the outline of his routine and the two thousand words that told a story of his relationship with coffee producer, Jhonatan Gasca, and the many hands required to get coffee from the farm to the cup.
As he cycled through the lines of his speech, his muscles flinched, hands mimicking movements that had been timed to perfection. He knew the thing by heart. He’d rehearsed it more than three hundred times.
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Back then, he was in a training room in Melbourne, practicing until eleven o’clock most evenings, dodging the prying eyes of competitors on the local scene and their coaches who had slipped through the door only to be quietly shown out.
In the first two rounds of the 2025 World Barista Championships, Simpson’s own stopwatch didn’t start. But any nods he gave towards the clock were perfunctory. He knew the pace of this thing the way a musician knows a piece of music; a familiarity so intimate it stops being performance and becomes something closer to breathing.
Fifteen minutes, twelve drinks. Four espressos. Four milk-based coffees. Four signature drinks, each built around two coffees sourced from opposite ends of the world, each carrying the heartbeat of two families whose livelihood depended on the harvest of such beans. Simpson took a breath.
Having spent the past eight years chasing the title, he’d given up social activities, friendships, sport, and sleep, averaging just four hours most nights. He had ascended through the ranks, claiming third in 2023 and second in 2024. He’d seen a sports psychologist to steady his nerves in the face of pressure. He’d shaken any sense of imposter syndrome, writing in a journal daily: I will be the world barista champion. Now, it was time to see it through.
As Simpson stepped out onto the world stage, he knew his every movement would be scrutinised with an unforgiving intensity. Judges hovered like a shadow in his periphery, clipboards raised to their chests, pens at the ready, an expressionless poker face donned like a uniform. The stopwatch was hit, the countdown began.
Simpson gracefully danced from one apparatus to the next, entering a flow state behind a workbench poised with portafilters and teaspoons, the familiar hum of the coffee machine his only companion. He had come to win. He was also pretty sure he was done competing.
Alongside the success of our national cricket team, ask any Australian, and they’ll tell you that woven into the fabric of our identity is a love for coffee. We drink 16.3 million cups of it every day, a figure that’s seen the industry grow to be worth more than $13 billion annually. With more than 28,000 cafes and coffee shops operating across the country, our obsession is proving a fertile breeding ground.
Melbourne alone is routinely cited as a destination for coffee aficionados; a place where a bad cup is not merely disappointing but something approaching a civic offence.
The flat white has gone worldwide, and our baristas are a calling card in cities from Vancouver to Nottingham. None of this, however, was inevitable. In fact, to look at the history of coffee in Australia is to see it was far from likely.
When British colonists stepped ashore in 1788, coffee barely registered. These were established tea drinkers, after all. It wasn’t until the years following the Second World War that coffee got a foothold in Australia. As we threw open our doors to migrants from southern Europe, they came chasing a better life and settled in the inner suburbs: Carlton and Fitzroy in Melbourne, Leichhardt and Surry Hills in Sydney.
With them they brought the rituals of home. The short black, the shared table, and the mid-morning coffee that was less a caffeine fix than it was a social institution. The first espresso machine arrived at Cafe Florentino in Melbourne in 1928. By 1954, Pellegrini’s Espresso Bar had opened in Bourke Street – it’s still there today.
For the next three decades, espresso culture remained largely the preserve of those migrant communities. The broader Australian population was somewhat suspicious of anything too fussy until 1988, when a set of liquor licensing reforms in Victoria saw everything change. Suddenly, cafes could serve alcohol. With pavement tables inviting long lunches that stretched into the early evening, the European-style cafe culture boomed.
Freed from the constraints of tradition and with no inherited orthodoxy about what coffee should taste like or how it should be made, Australia’s cafe culture developed with a competitive ferocity. Roasters began sourcing single-origin beans with the seriousness applied to fine wine. Baristas began talking about extraction variables and water chemistry. Cafes multiplied at a rate that forced constant improvement or extinction, and the consumer base that emerged from it all became one of the most discerning in the world.
“It was Australia that was responsible for producing specialty coffee and cafes,” says Dr Emma Felton, sociologist at Queensland University of Technology and author of Filtered: Coffee, the Cafe and the 21st Century City.
“High quality coffee, good beans, made with barista expertise. This started in the late 1990s and gained real momentum in the 21st century.”
You need only look to the spectacular failure of Starbucks as proof. In 2000, the American chain boasting venti cups and bitter coffee arrived in Australia with all the confidence of a company that had never lost before.
“Australia was the only country where Starbucks failed,” says Dr Felton. It lasted just eight years before withdrawing from most of the country, closing 61 stores in a single day in what remains the most spectacular failure in the company’s global history.
In just a few decades, Australia had developed a coffee culture so self-confident, it sent the world’s most powerful coffee chain packing. Behind it were the baristas allergic to mediocrity.
When Simpson was just sixteen years old, well before the competitive coffee circuit and stage lights of Milan, he was making coffees behind the counter of a small bakery in a country town four hours from Melbourne. As he’s quick to tell you, customers would avoid ordering when he was behind the machine.
Perhaps they resented a fresh-faced teenager making their morning cup. Whatever it was, Simpson got obsessed with figuring out why.
“I wasn’t even drinking coffee at that stage,” he recalls. “But I was trying it and realised, ‘Oh, I can make my coffee better by doing certain things and understanding every single variable.’”
Simpson never set out to be a barista. Engaged in a carpentry apprenticeship, he would visit a different cafe every morning before work. When he realised he was more excited about the next morning’s coffee stop than the job itself, he quit carpentry and never looked back.
What followed wasn’t culinary school or extensive hospitality training. He simply nurtured a quiet obsession that became all-consuming.
Working his way through better cafes before landing at Axil Coffee Roasters in Melbourne, he met owner Dave Makin, who had himself competed at the highest level and understood what serious pursuit of the craft looked like. In Simpson, he found someone curious about variables like milks and roasting, someone who refused to accept a cup that was less than it could be, and had a compulsive need to understand why.
It’s a familiar trait amongst baristas and one Dan Yee understands. The co-founder of Artificer Coffee, a specialty roastery and coffee bar on Sydney’s Bourke Street that has been operating at the top end of the Australian scene since 2015, came to coffee sideways.
“I fell into the coffee world as a distraction and was lured to it from the technical, geeky, community side and the flavour component,” admits Yee. “On a basic level, it piques my desire to be good at everything I choose.”
By 2007, Yee was judging barista competitions without even working in the industry, having passed a rigorous technical and sensory test. He travelled internationally with competition judging, competed himself, and later found himself making coffee at the TED conference in California alongside some of the best baristas in the world.
Eventually, with co-founder Shoji Sasa, he opened Artificer – a venue so committed to the purity of the product that it serves no food.
The coffee itself is the only thing on the menu worth talking about. “Actually specialising in something rather than being a supermarket for the brunch scene and doing many things suboptimally,” Yee says of Artificer’s unique concept.
“Seeing the correlation between selection of coffees, roasting them, and serving them made separating each one of those aspects something we weren't willing to hand over to someone else. It's in our control, and the product falls on our decisions.”
It’s this philosophy – total ownership of the chain from bean to cup – that has driven the Australian specialty scene to the level it now occupies. Asked why Australia dominates on the world stage, Yee points to something deeper than craft discipline alone.
“Like other parts of the culinary world, we have access to a diverse range of cultures but aren’t necessarily bound by their traditions. That gives us the freedom to take them to a new place without boundaries,” he explains. “With coffee, we took it and ran.”
If the World Barista Championship (WBC) is the arena where the Australian standard of coffee is tested, it’s here that our dominance on the world stage has been cemented. First held in Monte Carlo in 2000, the inaugural competition has come to be known as a worldwide coffee-making Olympics, attracting the best talent from around the world as competitors show off techniques that are equal parts art form and mad science experiment.
In some ways, it’s a strange thing to dedicate yourself to. The spoils of victory are harder to quantify than prize money or a trophy. What baristas really hope to walk away with is the acknowledgement that they are the best in the world at something more than two billion people participate in every single day.
In the early years of its inception, the competition was largely a Scandinavian affair. But as specialty coffee found its footing in Australia, our baristas have come to shake up the competition. Since Paul Bassett broke Scandinavia’s stranglehold on the WBC in 2003, the competition has functioned as both a proving ground and a north star for a generation of baristas who have built their professional lives around the pursuit of a single perfect cup.
Bosnian-Australian barista Saša Šestić took the title in 2015 with a routine that introduced carbonic maceration – a coffee processing technique borrowed from traditional winemaking – to the world stage. Then came Melbourne barista Anthony Douglas’s win in 2022, followed by Simpson’s in 2025.
If anyone knows just how unrelenting the pressure of competition is, it’s Angus Mackie. The ONA Coffee barista trainer from Canberra has been competing longer than almost anyone, having started in 2008. Since then, he’s accumulated regional titles, national finals and judged on a world stage. And yet, he’s never won the national title.
“Coffee is one of those things where there is so much that hasn’t been discovered yet,” says Mackie. “Even now, eighteen years later, there’s still stuff I’m learning and working on that I didn’t know about five years ago. It’s always been that industry where you feel like you’re part of the discovery process.”
There’s an urgency that underscores Australia’s coffee scene and its quest for forward momentum. While consumers might grumble about the rising cost of a cup of coffee, our baristas are quietly paying their own price for such an obsession.
In 2020, at the height of his competitive career, Mackie was diagnosed with stage three tongue cancer. Surgery and radiation severely impacted his taste receptors and left him unable to eat solid food or taste coffee for six months. For someone who had spent twelve years chasing flavour with the devotion of a scientist on the cusp of discovery, the possibility of permanent loss was incomprehensible. So, Mackie trained his nose to taste and helped curate the menu for the opening of ONA Melbourne.
Eventually, sweetness returned. Then bitterness. He retrained his palate from scratch, undertaking a conditioning process that rebuilt his sensory capabilities one flavour at a time. Two years after his diagnosis, Mackie returned to competition and in 2025, he placed second at the Australian National Barista Championship, just missing out on his ticket to the world stage.
“I was devastated,” he says, speaking from a quiet corner at the Melbourne International Coffee Expo. “The amount of effort in that year and the eleven years beforehand, it was like all this time, all these sacrifices.”
Those sacrifices include 40 to 50-hour weeks training for competition. As Mackie describes, the months before the competition are lived with monk-like focus.
“It’s all that’s on your mind. It’s so hard to have a chat with your mates or your family about anything else. That’s all you can think of,” he says.
Both Simpson and Mackie describe the Australian national scene as more competitive than the global stage. Healthy rivalries abound as baristas and roasters guard their creations with the secrecy you’d expect of a public relations team engaged in a smear campaign.
“It’s pretty brutal. I know a few of the other competitors, and they wouldn’t invite people that I know to watch or taste their coffee beforehand to try and keep it a bit of a secret,” says Simpson.
If this intensity is what has raised the standard of Australian coffee, it’s also one that has a ceiling. Just ten days before we spoke, Mackie made the decision to stop competing due to health concerns.
“Since I was eighteen, my schoolboy dream was to become Australian champion and to stand on the world stage and represent Australia. That would mean so much to me,” he says.
“Saying no to that was sad. It is huge. But I know I’m doing it for the right reason: my health.”
On the world stage, Australian baristas loom like demigods. But on home soil, theirs is an existence that often receives little by way of attention.
Simpson’s winning performance told a story of what goes into a cup of coffee. The answer? Everything. The farmer who harvests the beans. The barista who trained his nose when his tongue failed him.
The four hours of sleep. And the three-hundred run-throughs. The office commute might offer little by way of inspiration, but when it comes to that familiar aroma that instantly lifts us into the day and a taste so familiar it’s layered with memories, when it comes to that cup in your hand, we should probably tip better.