THE WORLD AEROPRESS CHAMPIONSHIP GOES DOWN ON MARCH 5TH, 2022!
The 2021 World AeroPress Championship will look a little bit different this year. In the first virtual W.A.C., National Champions will submit their recipes and a team of surrogate baristas will execute their recipes in Melbourne, Australia at Bureaux Coffee. We invite you to join us online for the largest internet coffee party of the year!
South Africa has a horse in this race in the form of Brandon Smith who won the SA Champs held back in September last year. Go Brandon! He will be up against recipes of 44 other countries! The fun starts at 1.30am tonight SA time!
Now that you’ve submitted, how does it feel? Did you learn anything from using a surrogate in the SA Champs in terms of how to instruct them?
"Now that I've submitted the recipe, my stress is definitely less but the nerves are high and I'm excited to be competing at a world level against some pretty great baristas. I won the nationals with a surrogate barista so for me, that is comforting with the format being the same, what I've noted from that is to give clear and precise instructions so that there is no misunderstanding about what to do as I will have no contact with the brewer.
Tell us a bit about the drama with customs and what your alternative had to be?
Regarding my coffee getting stuck at customs, it was at first very stressful and soon became quite annoying, there isn't much I could do from my side but I tried my best to get in contact with whoever I could to try and get it released but communications from the courier company weren't too great. But it has prepared me for future comps to have all the documentation prepared, knowing that it might definitely be a problem when it comes to customs. Having not received the official coffee I had to resort to finding as close as possible coffee to work with within 2 days, luckily regarding the water, Third Wave Water blessed me with a gift pack a week earlier otherwise I wouldn't have had the water profiles either.
Are you working with a cafe currently? Can readers hunt you down for an AeroPress? ;)
I am currently working at Millwick's Café in George, absolutely love to be in the Garden Route, you can definitely come to find me here for an AeroPress, and be on the lookout for some events in the near future, I might just come to brew some coffee at your local café!
