The Roads That Bring Us Together in Madrid
How a coffee, a competitor, and a community find their way to the Spain AeroPress Championship 2026 National Final
Sixteen regional championships. More than 360 competitors. One national final in Madrid. Across Spain, people have spent months preparing for a competition that will eventually bring them together in one place. There are coffees to explore, brewing recipes to refine, and regional events to organise. For some, the journey is about winning. For others, it is about the people they meet along the way.
HUDES | Worldwide Magazine on Manual Coffee
The Spain AeroPress Championship 2026 is, in many ways, a story about what happens around a coffee competition as much as what happens on the competition table.
On October 24, 66 competitors from across Spain will gather at PRÓXIMA ESTACIÓN in Madrid for the ninth National Final of the Spain AeroPress Championship®. They will come from different cities and coffee communities, carrying their own experiences, brewing methods, and expectations.
Some work in coffee every day. Others brew at home, driven by curiosity and a desire to get a little more out of their coffee. Some have competed before; others are entering this world for the first time.
Once the competition begins, they will share the same basic conditions: the same coffee, the same brewing device, and the same challenge of making the best cup they can. By the end of the day, one competitor will earn the title of Spain AeroPress Champion 2026 and the chance to represent the country at the World AeroPress Championship in Mexico. But Madrid is only the final stop.
Long before the competitors meet in the capital, the championship has already been taking shape in coffee shops, roasteries, and local communities across the country. It lives in the work of organisers who bring regional events to life, in competitors travelling to meet familiar faces and new rivals, and in roasters spending hours understanding a coffee before it reaches the brewer's hands.
There is also something that doesn't necessarily end when the results are announced. The friendships, shared experiences, and connections built around these events often last well beyond the competition itself. To understand what brings 66 competitors to Madrid, it helps to look at the roads that brought them there.
A Championship Built Across Spain
Before the official national circuit began in 2017, the Spain AeroPress Championship was a much smaller gathering, with just 16 participants. Since then, it has grown into a network of regional competitions that brings the event closer to the people who make up Spain's specialty coffee scene.
The idea was simple in practice, even if building it required years of work. Instead of expecting everyone to travel to Madrid or Barcelona, the championship could reach people where they already were.
Local coffee shops, roasters, and independent organisers became central to that effort. Each brought something of their own to the event, shaped by the people around them and the character of their local coffee community. The competition remained recognisable from one region to another, but the experience of taking part did not have to look exactly the same everywhere.
That approach has helped the championship grow beyond a single national gathering. It has become a circuit connecting coffee communities across Spain, including places that might otherwise sit outside the usual spotlight of the specialty coffee industry.
In 2026, the circuit reached a new milestone: 16 regional championships in a single season. Since the project began, that brings the total to 131 regional events and nine national finals. More than 360 competitors took part across the country this year, setting a new participation record.
The numbers tell part of the story. Sixteen regional championships mean sixteen occasions for people to gather around coffee, to test what they know, and to learn from one another. They also mean months of preparation for the people working behind the scenes, often within the same local businesses and communities that sustain specialty coffee throughout the year.
A regional championship can be a place to discover a new coffee, exchange brewing ideas, or meet someone whose work you have followed from a distance. It can also be an introduction to specialty coffee for people who have never considered entering a competition themselves.
Each region brings its own people, habits, and character to the circuit. Together, they have helped turn a competition into something that reaches further than the final result.
And while every regional champion has their own reason for wanting to reach Madrid, no two journeys are quite the same. The national final may bring them to the same table. The roads that brought them there are another story entirely.
From Galicia to Melilla
From Galicia in the northwest to Melilla on the North African coast, the championship takes on a different character in every region. Some events are shaped by years of experience. Others are part of a more recent effort to introduce specialty coffee to new audiences. Together, they reveal how differently a shared passion can take root.
In Galicia, Willy Gómez and the team at Astro Café have spent years building their regional AeroPress Championship into one of the circuit's most popular events. Much of its character comes from the people behind it. Their care and creativity extend beyond the competition itself, even finding expression in the posters produced for each edition.
For the Astro Café team, the event is not simply about deciding who advances to the National Final. It is a chance to bring local coffee businesses closer together and give Galicia's specialty coffee community a place to meet, exchange ideas, and become part of a wider network.
In AndalucÃa, the scale is different. Hosted by Delicotte Coffee Roasters, the 2026 regional championship attracted 57 competitors, making it the largest regional event of the season. The turnout offers a glimpse of the region's growing interest in specialty coffee, but numbers alone cannot explain what makes a community thrive.
In La Rioja, where wine has long been part of the region's international identity, specialty coffee is still finding its audience. Café Electi and Afortunato have been working to introduce more people to the possibilities of specialty coffee, creating opportunities for the local community to discover a culture that is still taking shape.
The work here is less about the size of a competition and more about what can grow around it. Every new participant, conversation, or connection helps establish a place for specialty coffee in a region better known for something else.
The Basque Country offers another perspective on how these communities develop. Jonathan Wong Loi Sing first joined the championship as a competitor. He went on to become a national champion, turning his interest in coffee into a professional path that eventually led to his own project, Native Coffee Roasters.
This year, he returned to the championship in a different role, hosting the PaÃs Vasco Regional Championship. The change in perspective says something about the community that has grown around the competition. People who once stood behind the brewing table now help organise the events, share their experience, and create opportunities for others to take part.
A championship can produce a winner in a single day. The people it brings into the industry, however, may shape its future for years to come.
And then there is Melilla, which hosted its own Regional Championship for the first time in 2026, organised by Makan Café de Especialidad & Bakery.
Its arrival marks another step in bringing the competition to coffee communities across Spain, including places that might otherwise remain outside the circuit. Geography can make participation more complicated, but it does not make a local coffee community any less worthy of a place in the story.
From Galicia to AndalucÃa, from La Rioja to the Basque Country, and now Melilla, each region brings its own circumstances and ambitions. Some are strengthening communities that have been growing for years. Others are creating the conditions for something new to emerge.
There is no single way for a coffee culture to develop, just as there is no single reason for someone to enter an AeroPress competition.
What connects these places is not that they are the same, but that each has found a reason to take part. And with every regional event, the road to Madrid becomes a little longer, reaching more people along the way.
The People Who Keep Coming Back
The road to Madrid is not a journey they make just once. It becomes a familiar part of the year, an opportunity to return to the same community and pick up where they left off. For MarÃa Alonso of Mia Coffee in Málaga, that journey has grown into something even closer to home: a family tradition.
MarÃa and her husband, Leo, met while working in two ordinary bars next to each other, long before specialty coffee became part of their lives. They started learning about coffee together and eventually opened Mia Coffee, one of the earliest specialty coffee shops in Málaga.
What began as a small takeaway counter has since grown into an established business. Yet the family remains at its centre, and the AeroPress Championship has been part of their story for almost as long as the competition has existed.
Leo first competed in an independent event in Seville in 2017, when AndalucÃa's specialty coffee community was still relatively small. A year later, he and MarÃa joined the official regional championship. They have returned every year since.
Today, the tradition extends beyond the two of them. Three members of the family regularly compete, alongside members of the Mia Coffee team. Their daughter entered her first competition at 15 and has already qualified for a National Final. Their youngest son joins the family on competition trips, helping with recipe preparation and tasting along the way.
Coffee, in this household, is not something that stays behind the counter when the working day ends. It travels with them, brings them into new places, and gives them another reason to spend time together.
That is what makes returning each year worthwhile for her. The competition matters, but so do the people waiting to see one another again. In her words, they come back for the community.
One of her favourite memories comes from the 2022 National Championship in Madrid. Several members of the Mia Coffee team had already qualified for the final, but MarÃa had yet to secure her own place. The day before the national event, she entered the Madrid Regional Championship and qualified as well.
The family had travelled in a rented camper van, bringing their children along for the trip. Once the competition was over, they celebrated Halloween together on the drive back to Málaga.
It was an ordinary family trip in some respects, but one made memorable by everything that had happened along the way: the competition, the excitement of qualifying, the friends they met, and the time they spent together afterwards. None of that would appear in the official results.
MarÃa's connection to AeroPress runs deeper than an annual competition. She has the brewing device tattooed on her right wrist, the same hand she uses to press its plunger. Wherever she goes, she carries an AeroPress, a small scale, and a hand grinder.
Her approach to brewing is just as personal. Rather than concentrating solely on what the judges might prefer, she experiments with water composition, brewing methods, and unconventional recipes. She wants to find a cup that makes sense to her, not simply one that fits an established formula.
Each year, she returns to the same question: if she had to drink this coffee for the rest of her life, would she prepare it this way?
It is a simple test, but one that puts the pleasure of drinking coffee ahead of the pressure to win. For MarÃa, a recipe has to be something she genuinely enjoys before it can become something she wants to present to others.
Her story offers another way of looking at the AeroPress Championship. There are recipes to refine, titles to pursue, and national finals to reach. But there are also families travelling together, friends meeting again after a year apart, and people finding a sense of belonging in something they love.
The competition gives them a reason to gather. What keeps them coming back is harder to measure.
Sometimes, the best part of the journey is not reaching Madrid at all. It is everything they would miss if they stopped going.
Every Cup Has a Journey
While competitors make their way through regional championships, another journey is taking place behind the scenes. This one begins long before the coffee reaches the brewing table in Madrid.
Since 2017, the Spain Roasters Competition, an independent initiative established by the Spain AeroPress Championship organiser, has recognised the work of specialty coffee roasters across the country. Each year, roasters submit their coffees for blind cupping, allowing the coffees to be judged on their own qualities, without the influence of names or reputations.
In 2026, the competition received 70 coffee submissions from across Spain. After a full day of tasting, evaluation, and discussion, Ineffable Coffee Roasters emerged as this year's champion. The title came with a new responsibility: selecting and roasting the official coffee for the Spain AeroPress Championship 2026 National Final.
For Ineffable, however, a coffee's story begins long before it enters the roastery. It starts with the people who grow it, the land that sustains it, and the decisions that shape its development through cultivation and processing. Roasting is one part of a much longer process, one that requires careful sourcing, precision, and a willingness to understand what makes each coffee distinct.
For the National Final, the team selected a washed Gesha from Zarza Coffee, a third-generation family project in Bruselas, Huila, Colombia, led by producer Jhonatan Gasca. The relationship began when the Ineffable team met Jhonatan at the Paris Coffee Festival earlier this year, building on the roaster's existing work with Cata Export.
The coffee offers a delicate but expressive profile, with jasmine, peach, and tropical fruit, followed by notes of vanilla and brown sugar. Its juicy acidity and silky body add further dimensions to the cup.
But identifying a coffee with remarkable qualities is only the beginning. Preparing it for a national competition presents a different challenge.
The coffee must be able to perform across different brewing approaches, in the hands of competitors who may have very different ideas about what makes a great cup. To prepare for this, Ineffable's team spent time testing and refining the roast profile. They used a ROEST L100 PLUS for experimental batches before transferring the final profile to their Probat UG15 production roaster.
The aim was not simply to produce a coffee that tasted exceptional under a particular set of conditions. It was to give competitors something they could explore, a coffee with enough complexity to reveal different qualities depending on how it was brewed.
As the Ineffable team explains, the goal is to offer competitors a coffee with plenty of potential to explore and express their own approach. That is where the journey of the coffee begins to intersect with the journeys of the people who will brew it.
All 66 finalists will work with the same beans. Yet there is no guarantee that the cups they produce will taste alike. One competitor might seek to bring out the coffee's floral character, while another focuses on sweetness, texture, or acidity. A change in grind size, water composition, temperature, extraction time, or brewing technique can lead to an entirely different result.
The coffee that began its journey on a farm in Colombia will arrive in Madrid carrying the work of its producer, the decisions of its importers, and the careful attention of its roaster. From there, it will pass through the hands of 66 competitors, each trying to understand it in their own way. By the end of the competition, the same coffee may have told dozens of different stories.
It is easy to think of a cup of coffee as the work of the person who brews it. But by the time it reaches the table, it has already passed through many hands and many places. The final cup is shaped by people who may never meet, connected by the work they do and the knowledge they share. At the National Final in Madrid, all those journeys will come together over a single coffee.
And for a moment, the work of a producer in Colombia, a roaster in Spain, and 66 competitors from across the country will become part of the same story.
From the audience, an AeroPress competition can look remarkably simple. Three competitors prepare their coffee. The judges taste each cup, select a winner, and the next round begins.
What the audience sees is only the final part of a much longer process. Behind every round are hours of preparation, coordination, and work that rarely attracts the same attention as the competition itself. There are people organising the venue, preparing equipment, coordinating participants, and making sure everything is ready before the first cup is brewed.
The value of these events extends well beyond the results for Gabriel Céspedes, a coffee professional and competition judge. One of the things he finds most meaningful is the curiosity they inspire. As more people begin paying attention to brewing methods and coffee quality, they also become more interested in understanding what goes into the cup.
That curiosity matters. It encourages people to ask questions, experiment with different approaches, and look at familiar things from a new perspective.
Competitors experience this firsthand. Whatever their final ranking, they leave with feedback, ideas, and practical lessons they can take back to their own work. A recipe that works well in competition might inspire a new approach to brewing at home or behind a café counter. A conversation with another competitor might challenge an assumption they have held for years.
These exchanges are valuable even for people who already work professionally in coffee for him. Experience does not mean there is nothing left to learn. Meeting others who approach the same coffee differently can reveal possibilities that might otherwise go unnoticed.
But much of what makes these encounters possible happens before anyone steps up to the competition table.
Venues need to be found. Equipment must be arranged. Coffees have to be prepared, judges brought together, and participants coordinated. Every event comes with its own collection of practical details, small decisions, and unexpected challenges that someone has to take responsibility for.
Most of this work happens out of sight. When everything runs smoothly, the audience may never think about it. They simply enjoy the competition, cheer for their favourites, and wait for the results.
The regional championships make this effort particularly visible. Local organisers often put their own time, resources, and energy into creating an event for the people around them. Their work is not necessarily reflected in a trophy or a place in the National Final, but without it, many competitors would never have the opportunity to take part.
There is something worth recognising in that kind of commitment. An organiser might not be the person holding the winning cup, yet they may be the reason someone gets to compete for the first time. A well-run regional event can introduce newcomers to specialty coffee, give experienced professionals a reason to reconnect, or help a local business become part of a larger community. The work is different, but its impact is just as real.
Specialty coffee is often discussed through the things people can see and taste: the quality of the beans, the precision of a roast, or the technique behind a carefully prepared cup. Yet the community around it depends on another kind of contribution, one that is harder to measure.
It depends on people willing to share what they know, make room for others, and put in the work to create something that the wider community can enjoy. The competition table may be where the results become official. But the conditions that make those results possible are built long before the first round begins, by people whose names may never appear on the final ranking.
Since 2017, the Spain AeroPress Championship has grown from a relatively small national competition into a network connecting coffee communities across Spain. Since January 1, 2020, its official organisers have held the exclusive rights to host AeroPress competitions throughout the country.
The journey has not always been easy. Like many independent initiatives rooted in hospitality and local communities, the championship was disrupted by the pandemic. Rebuilding took time, and bringing people together again required persistence.
Yet the community continued to grow.
Competitors became organisers. New coffee businesses found their footing. Regional events developed their own identities, shaped by the people who put them together. The championship also reached places that had never hosted an AeroPress competition before.
Over the years, something larger than a competition circuit has taken shape. It is a network built through repeated encounters, shared experiences, and relationships that have had time to grow.
In Málaga, a family continues to compete together. In Galicia, a team keeps creating a place for its local coffee community to meet. In the Basque Country, a former national champion returns as an organiser. In La Rioja, independent coffee businesses introduce specialty coffee to people who might otherwise never have encountered it.
In Melilla, a new regional championship opens the door to another community. And in Colombia, the work of a coffee producer travels across borders, eventually becoming part of a competition in Madrid.
These stories are different, but they share something fundamental. Coffee gives people a reason to meet. Competition gives those encounters a common purpose. And the community that grows around them gives people a reason to return.
Nine years on, the championship's growth can be measured in regional events, participation records, and national finalists. But its longer-lasting impact may be found in the relationships that continue after the competitions end.
All Roads Lead to Madrid
On Saturday, October 24, the ninth National Final of the Spain AeroPress Championship® will bring these journeys together at PRÓXIMA ESTACIÓN in Madrid.
Sixty-six finalists will work with the official competition coffee roasted by Ineffable Coffee Roasters, each searching for a recipe that brings out the coffee's potential. There will be moments of concentration as competitors refine their brews, the anticipation of the judges' decisions, and the celebrations and disappointments that come with any competition.
One person will become Spain AeroPress Champion 2026 and earn the opportunity to represent the country at the World AeroPress Championship in Mexico.
That result will matter. For the winner, it will mark the beginning of another journey, this time onto a world stage. But for the hundreds of people who have competed, organised regional events, roasted coffees, judged competitions, or travelled simply to support their friends, the season will mean something beyond the final ranking.
It will have brought familiar faces together again. It will have introduced people who might never otherwise have met. And it will have given coffee professionals and enthusiasts another opportunity to learn from one another, exchange ideas, and celebrate something they share.
Perhaps that is what makes a championship like this endure. The competition provides a date on the calendar, a set of rules, and a reason to gather. What happens around it is shaped by the people who keep showing up.
Specialty coffee is often judged by what ends up in the cup. Yet the cup itself is only one part of the story. Behind it are the producers, roasters, organisers, competitors, and communities whose work makes that moment possible.
When MarÃa Alonso reflects on what the championship means to her, she puts it simply: "In this case, the journey is the real prize."
It is a fitting thought for a competition built around so many different journeys. On October 24, all roads will lead to Madrid. What happens there will be decided in the cup. What remains afterwards will belong to the people who made the journey. (Hudes Magazine)
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