Amidst a lot of cheer and a room filled with the aroma of coffee, Vemana Madasu bagged the first prize at the first round of the regional Aeropress Championship held at The Roastery coffee house in Hyderabad. What makes the Aeropress Championship popular is its format, which is based on the three tenets — fast, fun, and light-heartedness.
The championship is a fan-driven global phenomenon in which challengers from around 60 countries compete against each other to make the best cup of coffee using their ‘Aeropress’ recipe.
“The goal of the contest is to create the tastiest brew possible, using an aeropress. The contestants are judged by the taste of their brew; nothing else is important. Three judges would simultaneously point toward their preferred cup of the current round of three brews, and the winner proceeds to the next round,” explains Suhas Dwarkanath, organiser of the championship in India.
Explaining the technique to curious coffee lovers Suhas holds forth: “Aeropress is the company that started this championship. The technique of coffee extraction is plunge style or pressure extraction using the ‘aeropress.’ Technically espresso style coffee extraction uses nine bar pressure, others, like pour over, filter etc work on gravitational force. Plunge or pressure extraction uses three to four bar pressure.”
He also kept the crowd occupied with his humorous coffee talk and quirky info about the contestants. One participant from Delhi was constantly being cheered because “he took three buses, two cabs and three Rapido bike rides to reach the venue.” Of the 21 participants only one was a girl and she was cheered the most by fellow participants amid selfies and photos for Instagram stories. Participants for this round came from Delhi, Oman and Nagpur and the rest were from Hyderabad. “Another aim of the competition is to encourage home brewing of coffee,” added Nishant Sinha, owner of The Roastery. He regularly conducts coffee workshops at his café. Interestingly, a few participants came after attending his workshop a week before this event.
Home brewers like R Lalit Aditya, Vemana Madasu, Mayank Solanki, Rahul Tanna, Rohit Rao, Hemendra Waswani and Vineeth Methuselah went back happy and confident of winning next year.
