Coffee cocktails, Greek mythology, mindset advice, and a writing talent that catches you off guard—Game Changer is a harder book to categorize than it first appears.
BY VASILEIA FANARIOTI
SENIOR ONLINE CORRESPONDENT
Featured photo by Vasileia Fanarioti. All other photos courtesy of Michalis Dimitrakopoulos.
What to know:
- Game Changer is a book by Michalis Dimitrakopoulos, World Coffee in Good Spirits Champion 2016 and World Barista Championship runner-up 2019
- The book covers everything from coffee competitions to coffee coaching, leading readers through the foundations of coffee education and through a series of coffee cocktails inspired by Greek mythology
- Each chapter begins with a personal journal entry from Michalis, adding to the intimate, poetic nature of the book
I knew of Michalis Dimitrakopoulos long before I knew him. Growing up in the Greek coffee world, even from Dublin where I was working as a barista at the time, his name had a certain weight to it—World Coffee in Good Spirits Champion 2016, World Barista Championship runner-up 2019, coach, mentor, the kind of person whose career I followed from a distance with curiosity.
We first found ourselves in the same room at World of Coffee Dubai in 2021. He was working a stand; I was there writing about the event for Barista Magazine, in what was one of my very first pieces for the magazine. We talked briefly, but I don’t remember what was said. In fact, knowing him now, he might not even remember this at all.
Years later, in 2025, I reached out to him for advice regarding a project. He said yes immediately. No questions, no conditions. His generosity stayed with me. It led to us meeting properly in person—in Prague, in early 2026, during the European leg of The Barista League tour where he was judging.
On the way home, we shared a flight. The book came up in conversation that day, among other things. I had known about it before we met, but talking to him in person made me want to read it properly. It took me about five months to finally sit down with it. Now, here we are.
Game Changer: An overview
Game Changer is an unusual object. It opens as a mindset and leadership book—self-reflective, direct, drawing on Michalis’s years at the forefront of high-stakes competition and coaching. It asks, from the very first pages, what it means to be trapped by the expectations of others, and what happens when you stop and ask yourself what you actually want. It is an immersive opening. You are in his mind almost immediately.
From there the book moves through competition mindset, the foundations of coffee education, the importance of training and coaching, and the elements of nature as guides for personal development. Michalis has a habit—a good one—of opening chapters with excerpts from his personal journals.
These are, for me, among the strongest moments in the book: unguarded, specific, written with a clarity that suggests someone who has been processing things on paper for a long time. Page 20 contains a line that stayed with me: the sense that if he doesn’t move towards something that fuels him, he will wither. You can track that fear, and the response to it, across the arc of the whole book. By page 104, something has shifted. He comes full circle. It reads as hard-won.
Woven through all of this is ice. The physics of it, the chemistry, the minerals, the shapes, the temperatures. It is a subject that might surprise you at first glance, but it makes sense within the world Michalis operates in—coffee cocktails live and die by the ice in the glass, and he clearly has a deep familiarity with the material. The ice content is substantial—roughly half the book, by some reckoning—and the expertise is real.
But the structure does not serve it well. There are no headings, no clear transitions. His personal reflections and the ice content sit side by side within the same sections, shifting abruptly between registers, and the effect is disorienting. A stronger editorial hand would have found a way to make the ice feel like a natural extension of his thinking. This is, of course, my own opinion—and a structural one rather than a comment on the substance, which is another matter entirely.
The recipes and the surprise
From page 52, the book becomes something else entirely. Twenty-six coffee cocktail recipes, each named after a figure from Greek mythology—not the obvious ones you already know, but lesser-known characters that most readers will be meeting for the first time. It is a small education in mythology alongside everything else.
Each recipe is accompanied by two things: a reflection on the myth and the character, and a note on how Michalis experiences the drink, what he felt when he created it, and what the glass holds beyond its ingredients. The technical elements are thorough—ingredients, method, flavor profiles, extra notes.
But what really stood out to me is the writing around each recipe, which feels like poetry: compressed, intentional, imagistic. He ties the sensory experience of each cocktail to the spirit and symbolism of the mythological character with precision.
Reading it, you understand that there is real intention behind every word, making you want to try every dingle drink. I say this as someone without a bar at home, which the recipes made me briefly regret.
What stays with you
Throughout the book, without ever announcing it, Michalis shows you layers of someone who has moved through darkness. Whether you know him personally and understand why, or whether you are meeting him for the first time through these pages, it doesn’t matter—he is not hiding from it. The grief is present without being named.
The epilogue itself is brief. What it says, it says quietly. And what follows reads like someone who has genuinely earned the advice he leaves you with—to care for yourself, to rest, to love, to forgive, to remember why you began. It is not surprising to me that Michalis has moved increasingly into coaching and mentoring in recent years. This is the voice of someone who knows what it costs to keep going, and who has chosen to make that knowledge useful to others.
Taken as a whole, Game Changer is for the barista who wants to grow professionally, for the coffee enthusiast who wants mythologically inspired cocktails at home, and for the person somewhere in the middle of something difficult who needs a reminder that the way through it is forward. It works on all three levels, unevenly but genuinely. And now we know Michalis can write. Let’s hope there is a next one.
Game Changer is now available on Amazon.
Vasileia Fanarioti (she/her) is a senior online correspondent for Barista Magazine and a freelance copywriter and editor with a primary focus on the coffee niche. She has also been a volunteer copywriter for the I’M NOT A BARISTA NPO, providing content to help educate people about baristas and their work.
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