2025: Nemo Pop — The Water Wizard

“My cup was very sweet and clear, with a velvety texture. We approached the championship with a simple idea: no defects.” — Nemo Pop, 2025 World Aeropress Champion

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The Champion

Nemo Pop is a researcher. His job, when he is not winning Aeropress championships, is studying water chemistry at APAX LAB, a company that makes mineral packets designed to optimize coffee brewing water. He is, in other words, the kind of person who thinks about water the way sommeliers think about wine — as a variable to be controlled, adjusted, and optimized, not a given to be accepted.

The coffee world has known for years that water matters. The Specialty Coffee Association publishes standards for brewing water: total dissolved solids between 75 and 250 parts per million, calcium hardness between 50 and 175, alkalinity around 40. Most people ignore these numbers. Pop built his career on them.

He won the Australian Aeropress Championship first, then the world title — two victories in a single season, both built on the same foundation: water chemistry as the primary variable, not an afterthought.

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The Stage

The 2025 championship was held in a venue that reflected the competition’s full evolution from barn to arena. The production was professional. The field was deep: Jan Ahrend of Switzerland took second, Dharun Vyas of India took third. But the story of 2025 was Nemo Pop, and the story of Nemo Pop was water.

Pop competed with Waved water — APAX LAB’s proprietary mineral formulation, designed to produce a specific extraction profile: high sweetness, pronounced clarity, velvety body. He did not use tap water. He did not use filtered water. He used water that had been engineered for this specific coffee, this specific recipe, this specific moment.

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The Coffee

Pop brewed a washed coffee — the specific origin matters less than what his water did to it. Washed coffees are, in a sense, blank canvases. They show you what the water did. A natural process coffee brings its own character — fruit, funk, fermentation — that can mask the water’s contribution. A washed coffee lays the extraction bare. If the water is harsh, the coffee tastes harsh. If the water is soft, the coffee tastes soft. If the water is perfect, the coffee tastes like the best version of itself.

Pop’s choice of a washed coffee was strategic. He was not trying to hide behind a big, fruity natural that would taste good regardless. He was trying to demonstrate that his water could make any coffee taste better. And it did.

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The Method

Pop’s 2025 recipe is built on simplicity. The complexity was in the preparation — the water chemistry, the grind calibration, the dozens of test brews he conducted before the championship. The on-stage routine was almost anticlimactic in its elegance:

• Dose: 18 grams
• Grind: Medium-fine
• Water: 93°C (199°F), custom mineral profile
• Position: Standard
• Water volume: 200 grams total, staged pour
• Contact time: 75 seconds

The procedure:

1. Pour 100 grams of brewing water into the Aeropress. Wet all the coffee grounds.
2. At 25 seconds, stir using a specific pattern: north-south, north-south, west-east, west-east (abbreviated in competition shorthand as NSNS-WEWE).
3. At 50 seconds, begin pressing gently. Press for approximately 20 seconds.
4. Total output: approximately 76-79 grams of concentrate.
5. Dilute: add warm water to reach 130-135 grams total. Add 20-30 grams of room temperature zero-TDS water.
6. Serve.

The stirring pattern was deliberate. NSNS-WEWE ensures every ground is saturated, every particle is exposed to water, and no channel forms in the bed. The bypass with room temperature zero-TDS water was the signature — it dropped the serving temperature to an immediately drinkable range while adding no new minerals that could disrupt the extraction chemistry.

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What the Judges Tasted

The judges’ notes were unanimous in their praise of texture: “velvety,” “silky,” “coating.” These are the words that appear when water chemistry is optimized — when the calcium and magnesium levels are balanced to extract efficiently without producing astringency, when the bicarbonate buffer is calibrated to manage acidity without neutralizing it.

The flavor notes were “pronounced sweetness,” “stone fruit,” and “a clarity that made each flavor distinct.” One judge wrote: “I can taste every part of this coffee separately and together. I don’t know how he did that, but I suspect the water had something to do with it.”

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The Contour Pairing: Burundi Tangara

Pop’s method — precision water, staged pour, deliberate stirring pattern, dual-temperature bypass — rewards coffees with delicacy and complexity. Our Burundi Tangara (Ngozi Province, washed, black tea and dried apricot notes, honey sweetness) is the ideal pairing.

Burundi produces coffees that are often described as tea-like — a descriptor that can be a compliment or a criticism depending on the brewer. With Pop’s optimized extraction, the tea-like quality becomes a virtue: the black tea notes provide structure, the dried apricot adds sweetness, and the honey finish lingers. The velvety mouthfeel that the judges praised in Pop’s cup is exactly what the Tangara delivers when extracted correctly.

Shop Burundi Tangara →

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Brew It Yourself: The Pop Method with Burundi Tangara

1. Water is the variable. If you don’t have custom mineral packets, use filtered water — not distilled, not tap. A Brita filter is fine.
2. Heat water to 93°C (199°F). Have room-temperature filtered water ready for bypass.
3. Rinse a paper filter. Assemble Aeropress in standard position.
4. Weigh 18 grams of Burundi Tangara. Grind medium-fine.
5. Pour 100 grams of water over the coffee. Make sure all grounds are saturated.
6. At 0:25, stir NSNS-WEWE: north-south, north-south, west-east, west-east. This takes about 5 seconds.
7. At 0:50, begin pressing gently. Aim for a 20-second press. Stop well before the hiss — you want approximately 76-79 grams of concentrate.
8. Add warm water to reach 130-135 grams total.
9. Add 20-30 grams of room-temperature filtered water.
10. Taste. Notice the texture first — velvety, coating, impossible to describe as anything but “smooth.” Then the apricot. Then the tea-like finish. This is what happens when someone who studies water for a living makes you coffee.

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This concludes the five-year survey. From a Finnish first-timer to an Australian water chemist, the Aeropress Championship has produced five distinct approaches to the same problem: how to make the best possible cup of coffee with a plastic tube and a paper filter. The answer, as these champions have shown, is never the same twice.