Breaking today is the news that World Coffee Events (WCE), producers of the World Barista Championship and other international coffee events, have announced what equipment will be used on-stage at the 2015-2017 WBCs. Nuova Simonelli and Mahlkönig return as equipment sponsors with the Victoria Arduino Black Eagle espresso machine and the K30 Vario Air, K30 Twin, and EK43 grinders respectively. The new cleaning products sponsor for the event will be Cafetto.
For these sponsorship positions, each manufacturer must submit their equipment to a WCE certified team who examines their capabilities and qualifies them as capable of meeting the demands of coffee’s highest-profile stage, with a bidding process then taking place amongst the manufacturers who do qualify. This process takes place once every three years.
You can read much more about the Victoria Arduino Black Eagle, manufactured by our partners at Nuova Simonelli, in our archives. Technologically, the machine is very similar to the previous WBC qualified machine, the Nuova Simonelli Aurelia T3. Black Eagles are already being used at all of this season’s United States Regional Barista Competitions.
Our partners at Mahlkönig also return as a qualified equipment sponsor for the 2015-2017 run. They’re offering a choice between some of the top grinders in their stable, including the new “Air” model of their K30 grinder, and the much-hyped Ek43 grinder.
Cafetto are makers of a wide range of coffee cleaning products–a good thing, since the cleaning needs of competition are prodigious. Each machine must be chemical cleaned between each run and polished to a high sheen–even a bit of smudge can be cause for these high-flying baristas to potentially lose valuable points from their technical scores. Cafetto will be sending their EVO line of organic-certified cleaners to the competition.
The 2015 debut of these sponsors will take place in Seattle, with the World Barista Championships going down alongside the Specialty Coffee Association of America annual event. You can find our coverage of the road to the WBCs over on SprudgeLive.com, including the currently under-way Big Eastern Regional Barista Competition, where the Nuova Simonelli and Mahlkönig equipment is already in use.
Alex Bernson is the Managing Editor at Sprudge.com. Read more Alex Bernson on Sprudge.