Coffee Tea Cacao 2025

Hi everyone, Varya here.

Thanks to the selfless help of my colleagues (and that is no joke — for some of them it took genuine self-sacrifice), who covered my shifts, I got to visit the industry's flagship show, Coffee Tea Cacao 2025, in Moscow.

Since Lera from DobroCofee Microroasters and I went purely as guests, we never got to see the backstage side of the exhibition, but the guest experience is an experience too — no less interesting in its own way, and it lets you look at the whole thing from a slightly different angle.

Moscow, admittedly, gets lovelier by the day, but there is not much point dwelling on that. Except that, in this context, the new venue is worth a word. The Timiryazev Centre is an impressive space, and quite easy to reach and to find your way around even if you are in the city for the first time — despite being, to put it very mildly indeed, a long way from the centre. Two or three other pithy definitions would fit here for a place that takes forty minutes and two changes to reach, but they fall outside the epistolary genre, so we shall leave them out.

The show took up barely a third of the complex itself, and that is with an enormous number of stands and the business-process conferences on the first floor. Although, for some mysterious reason, every single power socket went to the exhibitors. In the foyer we could not find one, not even the most rudimentary point to plug anything into.

Luckily, the exhibitors themselves had electricity to spare. Almost every stand, at any rate, could boast an espresso machine — anywhere from one to three of them, not counting grinders and other small kit. So in terms of the exposition, everything was set up and running very competently indeed.

Generally speaking, my impression was that the exhibitors outnumbered the visitors several times over. The atmosphere is fundamentally different from Flow or OpenCoffee, which are built around guests coming to visit. This is absolutely and entirely B2B, "here's ours, where's yours". On one hand that is a good thing: it creates a genuinely professional environment and a chance to swap contacts. On the other, an awful lot of people lose all interest in you the moment they realise there is no big contract to be had, or that you are their direct competitor. But events like this are still an unrivalled chance to taste a great many new lots in one place and to track the general trends and directions. Which is exactly what we did.

Taking the average across the board, experimental processing is now noticeably ahead of the classics. There were very, very many lots on show, running from classic fruit-forward profiles all the way to boozy ones. Personally I loved the rum version from FRUMENTUM, Colombia Primavera in Rome. The Submarine crew brought some seriously vivid lots. Indonesia Java Ijen is a hugely memorable coffee, firmly in the "wow" category. Overall you can really feel the Russian coffee industry expanding into the growing regions.

On the green coffee side, Colombia, Rwanda and Honduras were very heavily represented, along with a great deal of Indonesia, including my beloved Sumatra Kerinci. The rise in prices is impossible to miss — there is not a whiff of affordability on the price tags. Though by current standards that is hardly a surprise.

And then there were the championships, of course. Of the three places in Barista of the Year, one went to Nalchik and two to Irkutsk, which fills you with pride in "how wide is my native land", but also with a certain sadness that St Petersburg and Moscow put in a weak showing this year.

The sheer amount of equipment and accessories was a particular joy. A colossal number of Chinese brands. But my dream from this show, as far as equipment goes, is still the Simonelli Aurelia.

It was unexpectedly lovely to see and hear that we have built a brand that people value and recognise — and even though I was not there as an exhibitor, I heard a great many kind words about our work and our concept.

So, see you in the coming 2026, and here's hoping we get to present Toggle Coffee properly at an event of that scale.

Love you all.