Building a World-Class Roastery: What Huracán Coffee's Win Reveals About Excellence

The numbers from the 2025 Global Coffee Awards tell a story of scale: more than 2,000 coffee samples from over 125 countries, narrowed to 30 finalists from 16 nations competing at the World Championship in El Salvador. When the title of World's Best Roaster went to Huracán Coffee, a specialty roaster from Vilnius, Lithuania, it raised a question worth asking: what actually separates a world-class roastery from the hundreds of others opening globally each year?

The answer, according to Huracán's founder Vytautas Kratulis, is not what most people expect.

Sofia's Roasters Face the Same Question

In Sofia, the specialty coffee scene has grown rapidly over the past decade. The city now counts over 60 specialty cafes, with roasteries like Aroma Coffee, where owner Georgi Gagov roasts from green beans with an SCA (Specialty Coffee Association) Roastery Diploma, asking the same questions about quality frameworks and long-term excellence. The principles Huracán has built over nearly 30 years are foundational to any roastery serious about consistency.

Competition as a Benchmark

Roasting competitions have expanded well beyond regional events. Today, global circuits like the Global Coffee Awards place roasters from majority coffee-consuming markets against those from coffee-producing countries, creating an international benchmark for roasting excellence.

Vytautas Kratulis

Coffee can be a very local business. We all develop our own habits, assumptions, and understanding of quality, but competitions place your work in a much wider conversation.

The preparation itself forces discipline. Roasters must question assumptions, refine details that might otherwise go unnoticed, and prove their standards hold up under blind evaluation by international judges.

Quality Is a System, Not a Person

Here is where Vytautas's framing becomes most useful.

Vytautas Kratulis

The world's best roaster is not a person, but a system. What people see is the coffee, but they don't see the years behind it. Relationships with producers, trusted sourcing partners, quality control, logistics, and roasting. Hundreds of decisions are made by different people, often long before the coffee reaches the roaster.

This extends well beyond roasting skill into how green coffee is sourced, how cupping protocols are maintained, how quality control catches inconsistencies, and how the final cup is calibrated for different brewing methods.

Vytautas Kratulis

Exceptional coffees can be found once. Building an organisation that consistently recognises, understands, develops, and presents them at the highest level is much harder.

For roasters in Sofia or anywhere else, this reframes the question. The goal is not to produce one great batch, but to build a system capable of doing it again tomorrow.

Collaboration Across the Supply Chain

Winning international roasting competitions is not a solo achievement. The coffees that reached the finals were not the work of Huracán alone, but of the farmers and quality control teams who grew and prepared them.

Vytautas has served as a juror at the Cup of Excellence, an experience that shaped the brand's approach to sourcing.

Vytautas Kratulis

One of the things I appreciate most about the GCA is that it creates a shared moment between producer and roaster. A competition may recognise a roaster, but both are invested in the same coffee, and both want to see it succeed.

The Huracán team celebrated their win at a World of Coffee Brussels party, reinforcing that their success has always been as much about community as it is about quality.

The Unglamorous Work Behind Recognition

The title of world's best roaster is not claimed through a single standout performance. It is earned across the supply chain, year after year, through trust that takes time to build and transparency to maintain.

Vytautas Kratulis

The longer I work in coffee, the more I believe that quality is rarely the work of a single individual. It's usually the result of many people moving in the same direction.

As he put it:

Vytautas Kratulis

Becoming the world's best roaster is not about producing one great coffee. It is about building a system capable of doing it again tomorrow.