A barista's job looks simple from the customer side of the counter: grind some beans, pull a shot, steam some milk, hand over a cup. What that simplicity hides is a lot of small, fast decisions. Grind size, dose, tamp pressure, and extraction time all shift the taste of the same beans within seconds of each other, and a skilled barista is tasting and adjusting constantly, not just following a fixed recipe.[1]
That is the real difference between someone who operates an espresso machine and someone who understands why a cup tastes the way it does: the second person can smell or taste a problem and know what to change, under pressure, shift after shift.[1] That distinction matters because it is exactly what a small group of Indonesian baristas have proven, on purpose, on some of the biggest stages in coffee.
In May 2024, Mikael Jasin became the first barista from Indonesia to win the World Barista Championship, beating 53 competitors from around the world at World of Coffee Asia in Busan, South Korea.[2] It was not a lucky first attempt. Jasin had placed fourth at the same championship in 2019 and seventh in 2021 before finally winning it on his third try.[3] For his milk and signature drink courses, he worked with an Ethiopian landrace variety called Ají, grown and processed at Finca El Diviso in Colombia, and for his straight espresso course, he used a Gesha variety grown at Finca Deborah in Panama.[2] His finals routine leaned on meditation and mindfulness rather than theatrics, including a quiet, contemplative walk across the competition stage before he even started pouring.[2] None of that would have mattered without the coffee tasting right under judging pressure, which is the part that never shows up in a highlight reel.
A few weeks earlier, at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Chicago, another Indonesian barista made history of his own. Ryan Wibawa placed third at the World Brewers Cup 2024, the first time an Indonesian competitor had reached the top three since that championship began in 2011.[4] Instead of chasing the most exotic lot he could find, Wibawa built his presentation around a theme he called harmony from diversity, a nod to Indonesia's national motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, or unity in diversity. He poured three very different coffees, a Windy Ridge Geisha, an El Diviso Ombligon, and a Sukawangi Excelsa grown in Sumedang, West Java, and used the differences between them to tell a story about everyone involved in getting coffee from farm to cup, not just himself.[4] It is a small but telling choice: instead of treating his home country's coffee as a backdrop, he put a smallholder-grown Sumedang lot on the same world stage as coffees from internationally famous farms.
Indonesian competitors have also done well where the test is not brewing at all but tasting. In 2023, Mandie Soengkono placed second in the cupping discipline at the World Cup Tasters Championship, a competition built entirely around correctly identifying matching and differing cups by smell and taste alone.[3] It is easy to assume brewing skill and tasting skill are the same thing, but they are separately trained abilities. Cupping asks a competitor to sit through round after round of nearly identical cups and catch the one small difference in aroma, acidity, or body that sets it apart, with no second chances once the round starts. Winning a brewing competition rewards a great performance on one good day. Placing near the top in cupping rewards a palate that stays sharp and consistent through dozens of cups, which is arguably the harder thing to train.
None of these results happened in a vacuum. Barista training in Indonesia has been growing fast: government data shows the number of people enrolling in formal barista training rose from 455 in 2020 to 1,075 in 2021 and 1,130 in 2022, roughly doubling in two years as coffee shop culture spread and more young people started treating barista work as a real career rather than a part time job.[3] Indonesia is also the world's fourth largest coffee producer and fifth largest consumer, and domestic consumption has nearly quadrupled since 1990, which means there are simply more cafes, more training programs, and more chances for a talented barista to be noticed in the first place.[4] Smallholder farms still account for about 99 percent of Indonesia's coffee production, and the domestic market is projected to reach around 4 billion US dollars by 2028, so the same growth that is producing world class baristas is also reshaping the farms their coffee comes from.[4] Jakarta hosting the World of Coffee Asia event in 2025, the same event Jasin won his title at a year earlier in Busan, is one more sign of how quickly Indonesia has moved from a country that exports coffee to a country that also sets the stage for it.[2]
What ties Jasin's win, Wibawa's third place, and Soengkono's cupping result together is not luck. It is the same thing that separates a skilled barista from someone who just presses buttons on an espresso machine: years of deliberately training taste, technique, and composure under pressure, then being willing to put that training in front of judges from around the world.[1] For a country that grows coffee most of its own baristas have historically served to someone else's standards, having its own people set the standard on stage is a genuinely different kind of story, and one worth knowing the next time you hold a cup of Indonesian coffee.
Sources
Sources: Technique and skill information adapted from the guide below. Championship results and background drawn from the cited reporting. Sources checked on 10 October 2026. Cup Taste is not affiliated with or endorsed by Daily Coffee News, the Specialty Coffee Association (organizer of the World Barista Championship, World Brewers Cup, and World Cup Tasters Championship), Indonesia's Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy, EspressoLab, Mikael Jasin, Ryan Wibawa, or Mandie Soengkono. Cover photo by Chevanon Photography on Pexels.
[1] EspressoLab. What Is a Barista? Duties, Responsibilities, Skills, and Career Guide, https://espressolab.com/en/blog/what-is-a-barista-duties-responsibilities-skills-and-career-guide
[2] Daily Coffee News. Mikael Jasin of Indonesia Is the 2024 World Barista Champion, https://dailycoffeenews.com/2024/05/06/mikael-jasin-of-indonesia-is-the-2024-world-barista-champion
[3] Indonesia's Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy (Kemenparekraf). Barista: Indonesia's Promising and Proud Profession, https://kemenparekraf.go.id/en/articles/barista-indonesias-promising-and-proud-profession
[4] Indonesian Investment Promotion Center, New York. Ryan Wibawa's Third Place Win in the World Brewers Cup 2024 Boosts Indonesia's Prominence in the Global Coffee Market, https://www.iipcnewyork.org/post/ryan-wibawa-third-place-win-in-the-world-brewers-cup-2024-boosts-indonesia-s-prominence-in-the-globa