Aeropress Championship 2025 Lessons

A couple of days ago, the Indian Aeropress Championship Regionals took place in Hyderabad.

Of course, I had to participate.

This post is a distillation of all my learnings, how I prepared and why should anyone participate.

Did I win? No, I got eliminated too soon.

You'd probably stop reading. But don't you learn a lot from mistakes compared to wins?

Let's talk about the championship itself and not the Aeropress much as that deserves a post in itself.

The format of the competition is elimination. You brew the coffee along with 2 others. The judges will blind taste the coffee and pick one cup they like. If your cup is picked, you go to the next round.

First the regionals take place. Top 3 winners go compete at Nationals. One winner then competes Internationally.

Preparation

Around 10 days before the event, you receive a bag of competition coffee beans. These are the same ones you will get during the competition.

During this time, we experiment with the beans trying out different recipes and tweaking the controllables with Aeropress coffee brewing.

The parameters you can tweak are - temperature, grind size, coffee to water ratio and the time to brew.

You can search on YouTube for recipes or even championship recipes. There are tonnes of them. If you already brew with an Aeropess, it's best to stick to what you already do and tweak things. One thing to remember with the recipes you find online is that the beans are not the same - so the result cup will differ.

And when you burry yourself with a lot of recipes, it quickly gets overwhelming and returns diminish. Bloom or not, preheat the paper or not etc confuse you and they don't even affect the resulting cup.

This is a good video to go through where James Hoffmann talks about what would affect the cup and what would not. Prioritize more brews with one recipe and parameter tweaks that many different recipes.

Take a note of the taste notes and the mouthfeel of the coffee, the recipe, and the parameters you used.

I suggest doing this experiments over 10 days you have. I could not do this properly as I was traveling. Just before the competition, I brew around 12 cups in 2 days. And by the end of if, I guess my tongue got fatigue, I couldn't tell the difference between cups.

The outcome from this should ideally be one recipe and a good understanding of tweaking which parameter changes what. This is crucial because at the competition you have to brew a cup which is different from the other 2 brewing alongside you and a good cup.

At the competition

I arrived at the cafe, where the competition was taking place, with all my equipment - Aeropress, grinder, kettle, filters etc. only to discover they provide all the equipment.

Any which ways, I practiced on my equipment so I used only those in the competition. They had a world class Mahklong automatic grinder, but I used my Timemore C2 for the experiments. I didn't want to make last minute changes.

I was surprised to see more than 50 members participating in the championship. Most of them were baristas from cafés. There were a handful home brewers like me.

Coming to brewing coffee, one of the mistakes I did was to not take into account how cool the room was. I practice in my kitchen at home. Here, there was an AC set at 18deg blasting cool air from my back when I was brewing. My recipe had water at 80deg which is already cool than regular ones. AC cooled it more. What I had was a weak under-extracted cup.

This cannot be the only reason, obviously. I could have prepared well with a nicer recipe if I had all the 10 days to understand the beans.

A few more tips that I picked from look at others brewing and talking to the participants there:

It is good to check if the equipment you use is allowed or not. In my case, I had a metal filter for Aeropress which was from a 3rd party and not from original Aeropress company. This wasn't allowed. Thankfully, a co participant had the original one and they let me borrow it. Neither of us made it to the next round, that's irrelavant.
The equipment can give up in the middle of your brew. So it's good to carry yours and making sure it has fresh batteries etc. It happened to a participant that the scale stopped functioning midway. In situations like this, you have to eyeball stuff and that can only be done if you have practiced a lot.
Remember to keep an eye on how you co brewers are brewing.

There is a lot to take away from the competition. Just being in a room full for coffee enthusiasts boosts you. Everyone is friendly.

Would I participate again next year? Hell yeah.

Should you participate? Yes. Even if you are just a beginner. People are supportive. You will discover and learn a lot.

I hope this helps you in your preparation and motivates you to participate.

I want to leave you with a few links that helped in my preparation:

That’s all I have. Have a caffeinated weekend.

See you.

Keep on brewing!