Spain AeroPress Championship®
Our Stories
The Origin
Driven by a sincere commitment to celebrate fun and open coffee events for our Spanish community, we started to host the Spain AeroPress Championship® in 2017. During that time the Spanish specialty coffee scene was not quite like now. There were only several roasters mainly concentrated in Barcelona and Madrid. Only 16 competitors participated in the 2016 edition before we started to host the Championship. We made numerous efforts along the years to transform it into what you see today.
The Revolution
The efforts are all in the details: (1) we made the Spain AeroPress Championship® more open by not putting nationality limitations; (2) we made it more accessible by organising 15 to 17 regional competitions across the country; (3) we did a lot of free workshops to help coffee lovers to learn the basics of creating their own AeroPress recipe; (4) we improved the quality of the competition coffee by creating the Spain Roasters Competition; (5) we made it more fair by working hand by hand with the best manufacturers, so all competitors can access the top professional equipment; (6) and we made it much more inclusive and fun by cooperation with the newest projects! Because of all these changes we grew exponentially!
Exclusive Hosting Rights
Building on our successful hosting of the competitions for three consecutive years across the country (2017-2019), each year setting new world records for participant numbers, we witnessed the vibrant growth of the Spanish specialty coffee community. Fuelled by the passion of coffee lovers sweeping across the nation, we were offered the exclusive Hosting Rights in 2019, among with other countries. We wholeheartedly believed in our work and community, and consequently, we signed on and obtained exclusive Hosting Rights starting from January 1st, 2020. The exclusive Hosting Rights do not expire.
The F*** Pandemic
In 2020 a global pandemic swept across the world, resulting in a widespread suspension of all offline activities. It posed a significant challenge for us as for everyone. During such unprecedented times, we acknowledged the importance of supporting our local roasters. To address this, we launched the AeroPress at Home online campaign in collaboration with our local regional teams. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with notable figures such as the AeroPress inventor, Alan Adler, the World Brewers Cup champions Tetsu Kasuya and Jianing Du sharing their AeroPress recipes to show their support. You can check all the videos in our official account @aeropress.spain
We’re back!
What doesn’t kill us make us stronger! In 2021 we were back with normality in Spain. Our community just became even stronger than before, our regional host showed great devotion, each regional started to make their own poster, the events are more fun and we broke the record again of participants!
The New Generation
We believe in our generation: we’re open to everybody! Spain has changed very rapidly: it’s not a traditionally immigrant country, but within just 30 years, Spain has experienced a boom of immigrant inflow and we now have around 12% of foreign residents. In our team, people come from all different origins, and inside the competitor’s group also. Take the Spain AeroPress Champion 2019 as an example: Jianit Cai has Chinese origins, but he was born in Italy, and he lives in Spain with his family since he was 7 years old. Jianit speaks perfect Spanish, Catalan, Italian and also Chinese, of course. Jianit won, he was the best out of the 267 Spanish competitors of 2019, and he’s the best to represent the New Spain!
Applause for women
The number of female participants continues to rise each year. While there’s still progress to be made, this upward trend underscores the expanding inclusivity and enthusiasm for coffee and AeroPress within the talented female community across Spain. Numerous exceptional women have emerged victorious, claiming championship titles. Our 2023 National Champ Julieta Viola is just an example of that. She’s a young immigrant originally from Argentina, and defeated 358 competitors and won her right to compete in the World Final in Melbourne. We eagerly anticipate welcoming more girls into the coffee community!
The Regionals
Another mayor change we made was to start the tour of AeroPress regionals. We know that for a lot of coffee lovers and baristas it’s hard to travel: it takes time and it’s expensive when it’s not happening in their own community. We built up a team of regional hosts and local roasters each year to bring the AeroPress Championship to their door. In 2017 we had 7 regionals and in 2018 we had 17 regionals all across the country. We continued in 2019 with 16 regionals, in 2020 we suspended all our events because of the pandemic, and 2021-2024 we’re back again with 15 regionals!
The Coffee
How do we choose our competition coffee? The common choice for most countries is to work with one roaster who sponsors the coffee. But we believe that the only way to be fair and to provide the best coffee is to choose the coffee in a blind cupping with professional and independent judges. That’s why we created the Spain Roasters Competition in 2017.