Antique cartographic engraving of the world.

Global Coffee Awards

https://www.globalcoffeeawards.com

The Global Coffee Awards (GCA) is an independent world roasting championship organized by Perfect Daily Grind and Coffee Intelligence. Founded in 2025, the GCA evaluates roasters across multiple commercial brewing categories, rewarding the overall quality and range of a roastery, not a single competition performance on standardized green lots.

The GCA is a separate competition from the SCA’s World Coffee Roasting Championship. Both crown a “world’s best roaster” each year; they are run by different organizations with different formats and judging criteria. EspressoDrop covers both.

The Competition

Regional qualifying editions run throughout the year across North America, Europe, Asia, MENA, Africa, and Latin America. Regional Gold, Silver, and Bronze category winners advance to the annual World Championship, held at the Producer & Roaster Forum (PRF). In 2026, more than 2,000 samples from roasters in 125+ countries were submitted across all GCA editions worldwide.

Judging is blind. Entries are evaluated by a panel of qualified judges against sensory and technical criteria. The GCA rewards the roastery as a brand. Companies of any size, from small-batch independents to national roasters, compete on equal footing.

EspressoDrop tracks only the Filter and Espresso categories from each regional edition — the two categories that give the closest thing to a standardized, head-to-head brew comparison across roasters. The GCA’s other categories (Flat White Dairy, Flat White Plant-Based Milk, and a fifth category that varies by region — Ready to Drink in the US & Canada, Specialty Drip Bag in Asia and MENA), along with each edition’s overall roastery title, aren’t covered here.