This feature was originally published on October 5, 2012.

Competition season is upon us, as evident from our recent hella nerdy in-depth USBC rules change investigation. Your liver is no doubt twitching in anticipation of the guaranteed debauchery at NERBC in Atlantic City.

Which means it’s time to bust out your molecular gastronomy kit, find the obscurest beverage component you can source, and read up on some Deleuze. You need to ready yourself to emulsify up some espresso and Malaysian dragon fruit infusions, while giving a long speech on the deconstruction and phenomenology of coffee’s aesthetic milieu.

Or, maybe, I dunno, do something really crazy like making a simple, elegant, and damn tasty sig drink with a sensible story relating to your coffee.

To help you come up with your killer drink, we’ve gone and looked back into the hazy, distant past of previous WBCs, and the not so distant, but only slightly less hazy past of our 2012 USBC archive (Portland makes great beer y’all) to give you a rundown of some of the winning drinks of yesteryear. Put on your reading glasses; the library is open.

Bronwen Serna, 2004 (Photo by Mark Prince via CoffeeGeek)

Let’s start ...