Lithuania's Huracán Coffee Wins World's Best Roaster at GCA Championship

Huracán Coffee placed third in the GCA European regional in November 2025. Four months later, the Vilnius roastery stood atop every other entrant on the planet.

At the GCA World Championship, held March 20 to 23 in El Salvador ahead of the Producer & Roaster Forum, Huracán Coffee took Gold and the title of World's Best Roaster. KAFEA Terra of Greece won Silver; Colombia's Café Cultor won Bronze. The ceremony took place at the PRF Annual Dinner inside the Hilton Hotel in San Salvador, before an industry crowd drawn from a competition field that had pulled in roasters from more than 125 countries and over 2,000 samples across all 2025 GCA editions.

The GCA evaluates the roastery as a complete operation, not a single champion barista. Judges blind-tasted filter, espresso, and milk-based drink submissions against objective benchmarks. Huracán Coffee won two categories outright: Filter and Flat White Alternative. Both entries used a lot from Mexican producer Carlos Alberto Cadena Pale, whose coffee placed fifth at the 2025 Cup of Excellence Mexico competition. That sourcing decision is the core of founder Vytautas Kratulis's method: he has served on the Cup of Excellence international jury since 2005, and the CoE auction pipeline is where Huracán hunts its highest-quality green. If there is a single habit to steal from the world's best roaster, it is this: buy closer to the auction list.

The equipment behind those wins is equally deliberate. Huracán roasts on a Loring Smart Roaster, a single-burner convection machine built for repeatable profiles regardless of batch size, and passes all incoming green coffee through Sovda optical sorters that remove defective beans before anything reaches the drum. The roastery also holds FSSC 22000 food safety certification, a standardisation credential that very few specialty operations pursue. The combined effect is consistency at every stage: no defects skewing the roast, no batch-to-batch variance once a profile is locked in. At home, the closest equivalent is sourcing from roasters who name their producer and cite their green coffee's competition lineage.

Kratulis started Huracán in 1999 in a 16 square metre Vilnius space with seven sacks of Colombian Excelso. The roastery initiated Lithuania's first national barista championship in 2003 and has produced six Lithuanian national barista champions since. They joined the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe in 2003 and the Alliance for Coffee Excellence in 2005. Lithuania, not a country anyone outside the Baltics would have listed as a specialty coffee force before March 2026, now holds the top trophy in an event the GCA designed specifically to crown the world's best roasting operation.

Two bags are worth tracking down as entry points. Huracán's "Hangout" Kenya took Gold in the GCA Europe Single Origin Traditional category and represents their sourcing philosophy in accessible form: traceable, producer-linked, built for filter. For the lot that secured the world title itself, look for their Carlos Alberto Cadena Pale CoE Mexico offering and brew it as a pourover. That is the coffee the GCA judges scored above every other roastery on the planet.

In 2026, the GCA expands its regional schedule to cover MENA, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Huracán won this title before the full global field even assembled.