The AeroPress championship final is coming to Mexico City in December
The AeroPress world final goes to Mexico City on December 6, 2026, with a rulebook strict enough to copy at a kitchen counter.
On December 6 the best cup of AeroPress coffee in the world gets decided in a hall in central Mexico City, in front of a paying crowd, by judges who never learn whose cup they are drinking. The date and the venue went up on the organiser's site this month. A competition built entirely around one cheap plastic plunger brewer is landing in a country that grows coffee rather than only drinking it.
A December date at Frontón Bucareli
The final runs on December 6, 2026, at Frontón Bucareli in Colonia Centro. Twelve hand-selected roasters will pour more than 30 coffees around the bracket itself, which makes the day closer to a festival with a competition running through it. Tickets opened at $265 MXN for presale and early bird, and general admission goes on sale at $350 MXN from October 1. The organiser's event page carries the programme.
Twenty grams, five minutes, water and coffee
The rulebook is short and unusually strict. A competitor may use a maximum of 20g of ground coffee and has to produce at least 150g of brewed coffee. Only ground coffee and water count as permitted ingredients, so nothing gets stirred in at the end. Preparing, brewing and presenting all has to fit inside five minutes, and a coffee that arrives late is not tasted at all.
Those two numbers pin the coffee to water ratio into a narrow band before anyone touches a kettle. What is left to play with is grind, temperature and time. An AeroPress recipe that wins is a recipe about those three things, not about throwing more coffee at the problem.
No scoresheet, just a blind tasting
Each round is judged by cupping: spoon, slurp, spit. Names and countries stay hidden on the underside of the cups. There is no formal scoresheet anywhere in the process. Each judge decides privately, and on a count of three they point at the cup they preferred. The MC lifts the winner. If every judge points somewhere different, a designated Head Judge tastes all the samples and settles it, and that call is final.
Equipment is where competitors get their freedom back. Any filter is allowed as long as it sits inside the filter cap and adds no flavour of its own, which puts paper, metal or cloth on the same starting line. Grinders, scales, kettles, thermometers and stirrers are all fair game, so the AeroPress coffee that wins was made with gear most people already have on the counter.
The AeroPress championship, from Oslo to 70 countries
It started with three people in Oslo in 2008. It now runs across 70 countries with more than 230 events a year, and those feed national champions into the one final. Mexico holds its own national round on October 3, hosted by Todos X el café, which leaves the winner a very short trip in December.
What the format hands a home brewer
Every constraint in that rulebook already exists at a kitchen counter. A coffee competition that bans additives, caps the dose and runs a clock is a test of whether the basics were done properly under pressure, which is the same test home brewing sets every morning without the crowd watching.
Worth trying once before December: cap the dose at 20g, pull at least 150g into the cup, give the whole thing five minutes from grinder to first sip, and taste it beside the usual method. An AeroPress recipe built under those limits tends to show up whichever step was being fudged.
Drink the coffee behind the writing
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