70. The Work Behind Coffee Competitions | Andrea Tan

Coffee competitions are what the industry sees. The lights. The routines. The trophies.

But the real work happens long before anyone steps on stage.

In this episode, Cole sits down with Andrea Tan the first Singapore Brewers Cup Champion, green coffee buyer, judge, and World Coffee Events Representative. They unpack what it actually takes to run fair, meaningful competitions around the world.

Andrea shares her path from waiting tables to standing on the world stage, and how competition shaped her perspective not just as a competitor, but as a judge and now a WCE Rep.

We talk about responsibility, empathy, and the weight of writing a full scoresheet when someone’s poured months of work into 15 minutes.

Beyond competitions, the conversation expands into green coffee buying, trust, and what she learned from recent time spent in Ethiopia from shifting cup profiles to infrastructure changes and the evolution of transparency in origin markets.

This episode isn’t just about competition rules.

It’s about:

• What fairness actually looks like in practice
• The role of feedback in shaping careers
• How reps support national bodies around the world
• The changing landscape of Ethiopian coffee
• Why empathy and people skills matter as much as technical knowledge

It’s a conversation about contributing to coffee beyond the spotlight and about building systems people can trust.

If you care about competitions, green buying, or the long game of this industry, this one goes deeper than the stage.

Subscribe and follow along for more conversations like this on Buy The Drip.