I Brewed 3 World Championship AeroPress Recipes — Then Blind Tested Them on My Wife

Every year, the World AeroPress Championships bring together the most creative — borderline obsessive — AeroPress brewers on the planet. The winners don't just make great coffee, they bend the AeroPress to their will with tricks like ice spears, dual grinding, chopstick stirring, and bypassing water like they're mixing a cocktail.

So I brewed the last three world championship winning recipes and put them to the ultimate test: a blind taste test with my wife, who thinks bloom is something flowers do and that morning coffee shouldn't involve scales, water temperatures, or bypassing.

The Three Contenders

George Stanaker — 2024 World AeroPress Champion

1. Set up the AeroPress inverted, plunger at the 4 mark, with 18g of ground coffee.

2. Pour 50g of 96°C water over 5–6 seconds. Bloom for 30 seconds.

3. Pour another 50g of water over 5–6 seconds.

4. Stir gently in a north-south-east-west motion for 10 seconds.

5. Rinse the filter and place the cap on the AeroPress.

6. At 1:20, gently vent air from the chamber for about 10 seconds, swirl, flip, and place on the server.

7. At 1:35, press gently for 30–40 seconds until 76–79g has been extracted.

8. Add hot water to bring the total up to 130–135g, then bypass with a further 20–30g of room temperature water.

Taye Whiput — 2023 World AeroPress Champion

1. Add 16g of ground coffee to the inverted AeroPress.

2. Pour 100g of 89°C water.

3. At 30 seconds, stir for 5 seconds using one side of a chopstick.

4. At 45 seconds, add the remaining 2g of coffee.

5. At 55 seconds, stir again for 5 seconds.

6. Press down slightly to remove excess air, then seal.

7. At 1:35, flip and press for 30 seconds, finishing around 2:05, for a yield of about 75g.

8. Bypass with room temperature water to 115g, then bypass with hot water to a total serve of 155g.

Jibby Little — 2022 World AeroPress Champion

1. Grind 18g of coffee twice and sift to remove the fines, then place into an inverted AeroPress.

2. Pour 94g of 90°C water.

3. Stir gently 35 times, then screw on the cap and push out the remaining air at around 1:30.

4. Flip and press for around 30 seconds, from roughly 1:40 to 2:10, for a yield of 58–64g of concentrate.

5. Pour the concentrate over stainless steel ice balls.

6. Bypass with 90°C water to reach a total brew of 150g.

The Blind Taste Test

Three glasses, three stickers, no labels, no bias. Here's what my wife made of them, tasting completely blind:

• Coffee A: Nutty, light, with notes of caramel and sweetness. Her clear favourite.

• Coffee B: Less aroma, sweeter, citrusy and lemony, tea-like with a lighter body. Her middle pick.

• Coffee C: Timid and quiet, with what she described as "a far off distant orange" — like an orange you can see in the distance but can't quite reach. Her least favourite, though none of the three were bad.

The reveal: Coffee A was Taye Whiput's 2023 winning recipe. Coffee B was George Stanaker's 2024 winning recipe. And Coffee C — the most complicated of the three, with double-grinding, sifting, 35 precise stirs, and stainless steel ice balls — was Jibby Little's 2022 winning recipe.

Why This Matters

The most elaborate recipe didn't win. The extra effort behind Jibby Little's ice-ball method made for a fascinating brew and a lot of fun to make, but on the day, the simpler, punchier recipe took the crown.

Experimentation is still the key to good coffee — pushing your boundaries and trying something different, like ice balls, is the only way to find out what works and what doesn't. You might not want to brew like a world champion every single morning, but every now and then, it's worth the detour.

Happy brewing.