The AeroPress Championship in Spain
Spain AeroPress Championship® Official History
The Origin
Driven by a sincere commitment to creating open and vibrant coffee events for the Spanish community, we started to host the Spain AeroPress Championship® in 2017.
Back then, the Spanish specialty coffee scene was still emerging. Only a handful of roasters existed, mostly concentrated in Barcelona and Madrid. Just 16 competitors took part in the 2016 edition, the year before we began hosting the Championship.
Over the years, we’ve worked relentlessly to transform it into what you see today.
The Revolution
The transformation lies in the details:
(1) we made the Spain AeroPress Championship® more open by removing nationality restrictions;
(2) we made it more accessible by launching 14 to 17 regional competitions across Spain each season;
(3) we hosted free workshops to help coffee lovers learn how to craft their own AeroPress recipes;
(4) we raised the standard of competition coffee by creating the Spain Roasters Competition;
(5) we made it fairer by partnering with leading manufacturers, giving all competitors access to top-tier professional equipment;
(6) and we made it more inclusive and fun by collaborating with exciting new projects.
These changes sparked exponential growth!
The Exclusive Hosting Rights
After successfully hosting the Spain AeroPress Championship® nationwide for three consecutive years (2017–2019) — setting new world records for participant numbers each year — we witnessed the rapid growth of Spain’s specialty coffee community.
Driven by the passion of coffee lovers across the country, we were granted exclusive Hosting Rights in 2019, along with other countries.
Believing deeply in our work and our community, we signed and secured exclusive Hosting Rights starting January 1st, 2020. These Hosting Rights are indefinite and non-expiring.
The F*** Pandemic
In 2020, the global pandemic swept across the world, resulting in a widespread suspension of all offline activities. It posed significant challenges for us, as it did for everyone. In those unprecedented times, we recognized the importance of supporting our local roasters. To respond, we launched the “AeroPress at Home” online campaign together with our regional teams.
The response was overwhelmingly positive: the AeroPress inventor Alan Adler, and World Brewers Cup champions Tetsu Kasuya and Jianing Du, all shared their recipes to show support. All the videos are available on our official Instagram @aeropress.spain.
We’re back!
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger! In 2021, we returned to normality in Spain.
Our community emerged stronger than ever: our regional hosts showed great dedication, each regional began creating their own poster, the events became more fun, and once again we broke the record for 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 — and among the competitors — people come from many different backgrounds.
Take our 2019 Spain AeroPress Champion as an example: Jianit Cai, of Chinese origin, was born in Italy and has lived in Spain with his family since the age of seven. Jianit speaks perfect Spanish, Catalan, Italian and also Chinese, of course. Out of 267 competitors in 2019, Jianit won — and he is the perfect example of the New Spain.
Applause for women
The number of female participants has continued to grow year after year. While progress remains to be made, this upward trend highlights the growing inclusivity and passion for coffee and AeroPress among women across Spain.
Numerous exceptional women have emerged victorious, claiming championship titles. Our 2024 National Champion, Sara Solanas, is just one example of that. We eagerly anticipate welcoming more women into the coffee community!
The Regionals
Another major change we introduced was the creation of the AeroPress Regionals. We understood that for many coffee lovers and baristas, traveling is difficult — time-consuming and expensive — when events don’t happen in their own community. So we built up a Team of regional hosts and local roasters each year to bring the Spain AeroPress Championship® to their door.
In 2017 we held 7 regionals, and in 2018 that number grew to 17 across the country. We continued in 2019 with 16 regionals, in 2020 we suspended all our events because of the pandemic, and 2021-2025 we’re back again with 14 to 17 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.