We chat with Spain’s former AeroPress Champion and current national coordinator for the event about the wide accessibility of the World AeroPress Championship and his country’s regional competitions.
BY KAIE BIRD
SPECIAL TO BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE
Photos courtesy of Carlos Zavala
At Barista Magazine, we are gearing up for the upcoming 2019 World AeroPress Championship, happening at Bethnal Green in London on November 24 at Oval Space.
The World AeroPress Championship is now in its 12th year, and we are excited to be heading to London to cover this wonderful coffee party with the best AeroPressers in the world. While the World AeroPress Championship started out with three competitors, this year’s global event will bring together over 65 countries in London to press out some delicious coffees and celebrate a new victory. In anticipation of the 2019 London WAC, we are featuring “10 Minutes With” conversations with several people affiliated with the event.
First up we talk to Carlos Zavala, who is a huge proponent of the World AeroPress Championships; you can easily recognize that abundance of passion when talking to him about this event or his local national championship. Carlos has been involved in the Spanish AeroPress events since 2014, and in 2016 he took home the championship title and represented Spain in Dublin that year on the WAC World Stage.
The next year, when Spain failed to launch their national event, that void inspired Carlos to revive the Spanish AeroPress Championship as a stronger event intended to solidify the local specialty-coffee community in Spain. We talked more in-depth with the Spanish competitor about how the AeroPress competition has come to shape his local coffee community and the exciting future ahead for next year’s national event.
Kaie Bird: What is the World AeroPress Championship for you?
Carlos Zavala: It’s the coolest specialty-coffee party ever created.
What were you doing before becoming involved in the Spain AeroPress Championship?
I was working on my Ph.D. thesis on the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben. I needed tons of specialty coffee to keep writing, and I also loved to collect all sorts of coffee toys. In my spare time, I used to write for food magazines and blogs. I was living the normal life of a young intellectual.
What are you looking forward to at this year’s championship in London?
I’m excited to be going there with my girlfriend to party all day with coffee lovers from around the world. I’d love to see the new Spanish champ in the podium. That’s our dream. If we don’t get it this year, we’ll keep fighting for next year. Meanwhile, I’m going to drink so much coffee! I love English roasters, and I’m going to bring so much coffee back home to share with friends in Barcelona.
Why is the AeroPress Championship important for our industry?
The AeroPress Championship was created to give an answer to some problems inside the coffee industry. For example, in general it is very expensive to participate in most coffee competitions, so the natural tendency is to become more and more elitist. That’s something I don’t like. The AeroPress Championship is quite the opposite: We are open to everyone, especially all those who’ve only recently discovered specialty coffee. It’s also very attractive because people like to party and have fun. We don’t have overwhelming regulations and conditions, but at the same time we’re professional and serious. The process of selecting the new winner is completely blind, so there can be no doubts about how fair it is. There are so many reasons as to why I believe that the AeroPress Championship is the most essential of all coffee competitions in the world right now. In my opinion, it is the best coffee competition ever created.
How has your role and involvement in the Spanish AeroPress Championship evolved over the past few years?
In 2014 one of my friends from the food bloggers circle in Barcelona told me there’s a new specialty-coffee competition. I went to the event and found out it was the first Spain AeroPress Championship. Back then it was a small, intimate event with only eight competitors, but I fell into this whole new world of making your own perfect coffee recipe at home. In 2015 there wasn’t a Spain AeroPress Championship somehow, and in 2016 I went to compete and won. That same year I went to the world final in Dublin and met the other countries’ organizers. I had the feeling that we can, and should, do more to become a bigger and stronger event back in Spain. I reflected on how to improve the competition, designed a plan, and I then talked directly with Tim Varney and Tim Williams about my ideas. They’re really open to new ideas and fresh blood, so I started to organize the third edition of the Spain AeroPress Championship in 2017.
I have been the national coordinator since then and I’ve reached out to our specialty coffee roasters all across the country to do regional competitions. We had seven regionals and 84 competitors in 2017. Then, in 2018 we reached to every corner of Spain with 17 regionals and 244 competitors, and now in 2019 we had 16 regionals and 256 competitors. For two years in a row, Spain has had the largest national AeroPress competition in the world and in history. The potential of our community has always been there, and I believe we can still do better next year. I don’t see a limit on this for us.
We’ll be back with the second part of our interview with Carlos on Barista Magazine Online tomorrow!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kaie Bird is a coffee professional and event organizer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. She is the brains behind Sharing Tables, a group that connects the specialty-coffee community in Tel Aviv through events and outreach.
