We wrap up our interview with the national coordinator for Spain’s extensive network of AeroPress championships.
BY KAIE BIRD
SPECIAL TO BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE
Photos courtesy of Carlos Zavala
From the editor: Yesterday we began a series of “10 Minutes With” interviews—in advance of the World AeroPress Championship happening later this month—by chatting with Carlos Zavala, Spain’s 2016 AeroPress Champion and current national coordinator for the country’s competitions. Today we finish our chat with Carlos, who will be traveling to London to cheer on Spain’s competitor and enjoy the party.
Kaie Bird: Was it a hard choice for you to take a leadership role in the AeroPress championship since it meant that you couldn’t compete again?
Carlos Zavala: Yes, it was hard because I am a competitive person and I love to do all the experiments before the competition. Then again, I also got a lot of pleasure from making this event better and better every year. I can actually see the community growing and people enjoying it, with big smiles on their faces. It’s worth it.
What does the role of being a host for your country mean for you?
It is a responsibility. My position is to work for the community and find ways to make it stronger. I’m aware that the more our local competition grows, the higher an impact it will have on the whole Spanish coffee industry.
With so many regional events building up to Spain’s AeroPress final every year, how do you keep track of it all?
We need to be extremely organized to keep track of everything, especially during the two or three months of nonstop events every weekend. From May to July it’s just crazy. The members of the team can do different tasks very efficiently, and we also look for new talented people to join our team. Being able to delegate tasks is always essential. My main task on our team is to solve problems to help make things easier for my partners and work on the season planning. We take notice of all the things that are not working, but we don’t get frustrated because that does not help us move forward. We attack the problems one by one.
What does an average day look like for you during AeroPress season?
On a normal day, I wake up very early and it’s the best moment of the day: my first coffee. It can be a filter or a simple Moka, and I sit at the table to enjoy it. I think about all the tasks for the day. Then begins the crazy day of emails, calls, and meetings, with more and more coffee. We have fun in the competitions, but with all of the organizing work before, we need to be precise, responsible, and efficient. If I need to work during the night—which happens very frequently, especially during the finals season—coffee is my best companion.
What does it mean to have this event for Spain?
We have done this competition for three years now. We take care handling all the details to make our regionals and championship fair, open, and fun. We don’t set limitations on nationality, age, or anything. Every coffee lover can come and try; everybody is welcome to play and party with us. We celebrate specialty coffee all across Spain. We have competitors with whom it’s their first time to make coffee with an AeroPress and [they have] ended up winning with just a little instruction. Those same people fell in love with coffee from these events and started to discover more about the specialty-coffee world.
Imagine if there’s just one competition in Barcelona; a lot of people could not come because of their job, because of the cost, or other reasons. We have strong cities like Madrid, Sevilla, and Barcelona, but we have so many other cities that are into the specialty-coffee culture: Valladolid, Valencia, Tenerife, La Coruña, etc. All of the country is involved, and all of our regionals are equally as important.
For the final we also have a Spain Roaster Competition to choose the most suitable coffee for us to use. With the regionals, we have involved most of the Spanish roasters and have witnessed a huge boom in just three years. We now have more than 90 roasters in Spain as part of this event! We’re a team of regional coordinators who are cultivating the local coffee communities, and every year the majority of the competitors are new ones. More and more people are getting interested in specialty coffee now because of this event.
The final this year in Madrid was a whole-day event. We had the final, but we also had workshops, cuppings, talks, tea from Yunnan forest, coffee cocktails, gourmet food, craft beer, cool DJs, etc. It was really a mini-coffee festival. We held it on a Saturday in Madrid and the location is just beside Royal Botanic Gardens and Prado Museum. Hundreds of people visited us to spend their time with friends or family. It was our best event so far.
If you weren’t working in coffee, what would you be doing?
I’d be doing what I was doing before I started: writing and traveling, while still drinking a lot of coffee.
Now that your local championship is over, what is your head space as you look toward the world championship in London this month?
The Spain AeroPress Champion for 2019 is the best among 256 competitors. The main point of doing so many regionals each year is to make it more and more competitive. We do this because we want to have better results at the world level, and we’re pretty conscious about how good the competitors are from other countries. We choose the best champion and then we support them to the end, but we also prepare them with the awareness that if they want to be among the best AeroPress brewers in the world, it’s going to be extremely hard.
The AeroPress championship is the hardest coffee competition in the world, and our local championship is the hardest on a national level. It’s also important to let our champion know that we also go to London to make friends with other competitors and coffee professionals, because we all share the same goal and the same passion. The last year in Sydney we had so much fun visiting coffee shops and going to restaurants and pubs with the champions from Venezuela, France, Colombia, USA, and England!
What’s ahead for the future of the Spain AeroPress Championship in 2020?
This year we had the final for the very first time in Madrid. Now that this year has wrapped up, we’re working on a new coffee festival. If you want to see the best baristas of Spain, party all day, try the best Spanish roasters, drink awesome beers, wines, and cocktails, eat delicious food, attend conferences and infinite cuppings, etc., you should definitely join us for next year’s championship here in Spain! For 2020, we’re working on a new project: the Mad Coffee Festival. All the news will be published on Mad Coffee Festival’s website.
What about your work with the Spanish championship makes you feel proud?
Our community believes in us. In a time like ours, where skepticism and nihilism are everywhere, it makes me happy to see enthusiastic people willing to learn more about coffee. In the end, it’s not just about winning a trophy. It’s just coffee, you know, but the lessons and the joy you have during the entire process can help people improve other areas of their lives.
What is one word that describes your national event?
Friendship.
You can find live footage of the Spain AeroPress Championship final here.
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.
