Mithilesh Vazalwar is very passionate about coffee. He doesn’t need to throw around jargon for you to learn that because his voice and recent effort exudes his love for it. Vazalwar recently became India’s National Barista Champion for 2022, the most prestigious award in the coffee industry in the country. It is also a dream he has toiled and worked towards for the last eight years, when he first began his journey in coffee.

Interestingly, the Nagpur-based barista’s introduction to the beverage came through a combination of his background in sports and finance. He explains, “My journey with coffee started with badminton because I used to travel in and outside the country and drink a lot of it at that time. My question was, ‘How can coffee taste so different in every place’ but I didn’t know if I could pursue something in coffee because there was no roadmap for it.” It took pursuing his Chartered Accountancy and eventually going for a meeting to Australia in 2015 to change his mind. It was there that he saw the coffee culture and realised he wanted to be involved with it.