Specialty Coffee: Baristas, Brewing Gear and Roasters — 2026-09-22

Top developments

Dongseo Foods crowns 2026 Kanu Barista Champion

Dongseo Foods wrapped up its "2026 Kanu Barista Championship" this week, with barista Eom Seong-jin taking the title. The competition tested coffee extraction skills and creative menu development, and the company framed the finale around strengthening coffee culture in Korea.

Italy's bar price debate continues — espresso now averages €1.30

New reporting this week traces how geopolitics has pushed the average Italian espresso to €1.30 — up 25 cents in five years — with war-driven energy costs hitting bars and roasteries, and climate and transport costs driving green coffee prices too. It keeps pressure on the Istituto Espresso Italiano's argument that the tazzina needs sell for closer to €2 to be sustainable.

Palermo Coffee Festival readies "Generazione C" with young baristas as tutors

The Palermo Coffee Festival, running 25–27 September 2026, will feature a "Generazione C" programme where young coffee professionals serve as tutors and ambassadors for café culture — a grassroots talent pipeline for Italy's barista scene.

New cafés open from Brisbane to the UAE

Brisbane's Latrobe Terrace welcomed a new hybrid venue this week — part café, part retail space, part co-working nook — serving specialty coffee, creative beverages and pastries from Sprout. Meanwhile, a BBC Good Food ME roundup (published 4 days ago) highlights new cafés and roasters across the UAE putting their own spin on specialty coffee.

Gear coverage refreshed: commercial and home espresso machine rankings

This week, Propel updated its September 2026 roundup of the 10 best commercial espresso machines for cafés, covering 2-group, heat-exchanger and PID models for small shops. Serious Eats also refreshed its tested list of the 14 best espresso machines of 2026, flagging the Rancilio Silvia Pro X as a dual-boiler pick while noting the La Marzocco Linea Micra's near-$4,000 price is a hard sell for most users. Coffeeness's new review of the Fellow espresso machine praises its digital PID controller, one-degree temperature adjustment and ball-joint steam wand reminiscent of the La Marzocco Strada.

Local view

• 名古屋情報通 reported the Nagoya Coffee Festival (名古屋コーヒーフェスティバル), held 19–20 September at the Chūnichi Building in downtown Nagoya, bringing together distinctive regional roasters — the latest stop on Japan's busy autumn coffee-festival circuit.
• Sankei Shimbun ran a feature on Japanese barista Tetsu Kasuya (粕谷哲)， profiling his ambition to "cool things down until everyone can recreate the world's best coffee flavour" — a nod to his global brewing-method legacy.
• 한국경제 (Hankyung) covered the 2026 Chuncheon-style "Cheongchun Coffee Festival" talk concert in Seoul's Songpa district, where owners of Seonho Coffee and Manuals Coffee discussed "how neighbourhood cafés survive" against the draw of Hongdae's famous coffee scene.

Context & numbers

• Italy's average espresso price has reached €1.30, up 25 cents over five years.
• Fipe estimates an Italian espresso should sell for at least €2 to cover the more than thirty cost lines behind a cup — starkly illustrated by a bar in Venafro charging just €0.50 to customers who bring their own cup.
• The upcoming World Barista Championship in Panama City (23–25 October 2026, alongside the first World of Coffee Latin America) will feature 50+ national champions, each with 15 minutes to present four espressos, four milk drinks and four signature beverages.

On the radar

• Palermo Coffee Festival, 25–27 September 2026, with the Generazione C youth-tutor programme.
• World of Coffee Panama / World Barista Championship, 23–25 October 2026 — less than a month before national-champion qualifying deadlines.
• Athens Coffee Festival 2026 is again running dedicated roasting championship venues, per recent cached festival pages.
• A small Nagoya-format trend to watch: regional Japanese coffee festivals (Nagoya this week, Sapporo's pairing festival with a record 31 shops earlier this month) are increasingly anchoring local roaster visibility.