Finnish Coffee Culture shows Diversity at Helsinki Coffee Festival

National Cup Tasters and Brewers Cup

In this years festival, SCA Finland organised two coffee competitions: Cup Tasters and Brewers Cup. Roosa Jalonen, a Coffee Consultant based on London, won the Cup Tasting and Jani Mikkonen, a barista and a founder of Artisan Café based in Helsinki, is the winner of the Brewers Cup. Both of the winners will represent Finland in international competitions that will be organised later this year in Dubai.

It was a first year for a while that Barista of the Year –competition was not organised in Finland. Maybe it tells where the coffee trends are going?

Coffee-geek’s dream event

From a coffee professional’s perspective, Helsinki Coffee Festival is great event to get to know the Finnish coffee scene – most of the roasteries are there. It is also an awesome place to taste many different coffees, as all of the roasteries are presenting their coffee products. So if you’re a coffee geek – looking for new interesting coffees to taste and buy, or you’re about to renew your coffee gear, Helsinki Coffee Festival is the place to be. On the other hand, I think this year the festival lacked the wow-factor and fun side of it. The event has been quite similar in the past year, so maybe a little concept update would be good?

Best of Helsinki Coffee Festival

• There were two different parties sampling “Coffee without Coffee” in the festival. Our Blend 2080 wanted to raise conversation and woke up consumers to think about the future of coffee. At the Lotta Svärd Foundation’s stand one got an opportunity to taste substitute coffee that was common during the war times in Finland.
• Cool HCF-products! I know at least couple of my colleagues bought Helsinki Coffee Festival caps :)
• Coffee Pixels Edible Coffee. Chocolate bar with coffee, there were two taste variants: Cascara & Milk, both super yummy!
• Cup Taster’s competition was said to be extremely difficult this year. The cupping table was put together by Roman Kolpaktsi.
• Great keynotes and panels e.g. our trainer Karkki talked about water & coffee.

All in all, Helsinki Coffee Festival is a great event for networking, tasting and learning basics about coffee. For coffee professionals that have been working in the industry already for a while, the event could offer more in-depth information in a form of workshops and lectures.

Keep up the good work Helsinki Coffee Festival and see you next year! :)

All the great photos used in this post by  Paavo Pykäläinen / Helsinki Coffee Festival.