Review: Vienna Coffee Festival 2025

A friend of mine invited me to attend the Vienna Coffee Festival together. So we did for one day. I wanted to write a summary, what I experienced and learned.

The Vienna Coffee Festival (edition 2025) takes place from Friday (yesterday) to Sunday (tomorrow). The entrance poster mentions “11 years”. So I assume it takes place the eleventh time. It is an event for coffee lovers where coffee brewers, coffee machine producers, cup and mug producers, coffee roasters, coffee baristas, and latte artists come together to share thoughts, ideas, and let people experience different kinds of coffee. We got “Super early bird tickets” in April and paid 13€ whereas the ticket on-site costs 25€. Upon entry, you get a mug for 1€ which is paid back when you leave and bring back the mug. The core idea is that you visit various booths and they brew coffee for you; for free. So you can taste various flavors and roasts. However, there are also booths where people present talks about the economic side of coffee, explain the differences in cultures, or just play music. There was also the Austrian competition for baristas going on during our attendance.

Karl-Marx hall is used as venue for the festival. In the front, your ticket is checked and you can get your refund mug. Many coffee brewing booths come first and some talk- or music-related booths can be found in between. Not the entire hall is filled. The final third cannot be reached and the rear part is used for food stands. We got some Indian vegan lunch, but they also offer Thai or more Austrian/Czech style cuisine. Water supply and toilets are available in the north and well-maintained.

Markus from gota coffee was so kind to present us a lot of details about coffee making. He showed us the ikawa coffee roasting machine. This machine allows you to define a profile, which defines the temperature curve the machine is following during the roasting process. Curves are shared between roasting aficionada on their website. Markus points out that the level of uniformity in the roasting process achieved by the machine is pretty good which makes results more predictable. The issue with coffee roasting is that commonly you get coffee beans in sacks of 5 kg. Thus it is not easy to try many different coffee beans with the same curves on a hobby level.

By the way, MyHomeRoast was also present at the festival. A sales woman introduced us to their approach. It seemed like MyHomeRoast has limited configurability (compared to ikawa), but they also seem to work in different price ranges. Whereas MyHomeRoast machines cost about 700€, the prices of ikawa machines are not even listed on their website.

Katharina from gota coffee made us some cascara tea. This is some herbal tea made from the dried skins and pulp of coffee cherries. She mentioned that one uses about 4g of cascara for 100ml hot water. Cascara was considered a waste product in Europe, but tea was made at plantation sites since the early days. It contains a small amount of coffee and we loved it. Katharina also introduced us to AeroPress, an Espresso equipment which uses air and human strength to build up the pressure.

On Saturday, there were three people competing in “Latte Art” in the morning and five people competing in “Barista” in the afternoon. It is not easy to present your coffee (origin, date of roasting, flavor characteristics, …) and brewing approach (temperature, duration) while actually making the coffee in time. Each participant seemed to finish off explaining their signature drink. We observed a recognizable difference between first-time participants and experienced competitors. The jury watched each step, but recognizably only one judge was allowed to be in the vicinity of the examinee. It felt like the style of presentation, hygiene, timing, and taste were taken into account.

What a fun experience. It seems to be a growing community and all people have been kind to us. I am a coffee drinker and made coffee with different equipments, but what I do, is far from the professional level. It was nice to learn some stuff from a different field.