Training Log by Michael Manhart - Reflections on the Austrian Aeropress Championship 2019

On the 1st of June, it was time again for the Austrian Aeropress Championship. A lovely competition with a very direct “knock-out” system. There are always 3 players and only one move's on in each round - after a decision done by three judges (actually by pointing at the best cup with their fingers on the count of three). We had lovely judges with very high competence in coffee. What did I do for training? I wanted to outrun the other competitors by not using an over-extraction with by-pass water as I thought many would use.

According to the judging - your cup needs to stick out. So I went for a rather conventional recipe of 18gr coffee to 220 gr of water. I ground twice (first very coarse to remove the chaff with air) and then a second grind for the final particle size. Well, this helped me to get to the quarter-finals but there I met the later winner, my dear friend Viktoria Arthofer (the probably best coffee making person in Austria. So far she won the brewers cup, coffee in good spirits and now Aeropress and always was amongst the top over the last years of competition). What happened in the quarter-finals? The same that happened to her in all rounds - also in the final round: all three fingers of the judges pointed at her cup. So, without any doubt, she deserved this victory as this was not happening very often in this year’s Aeropress Championship in Austria.

(Actually, Viktoria used an inverted overextraction with by-pass water ;-)