And at the end of it all, I found that all I needed was a $40 AeroPress, $50 Chestnut C2 hand grinder, and some good quality beans.
Aeropress allows you to combine immersion and high pressure with a £25 device that largely self-cleans, and is small enough to travel with. It makes a smooth, rich-tasting coffee.
With electric grinders you pay for the burr, which is what really matters, and then an electric motor. But if you buy a fairly decent hand grinder like the C2 chestnut, you get a far better burr for the same price, and because of that hand grinding is really easy-going and quick. I enjoy doing it every morning.
There are some coffee enthusiasts that create over-complicated aeropress recipes, but the truth is that it was designed for simplicity. What I've found matters is:
1. Small-to-medium grind size
2. Stand upside down to immerse for longer
3. Use 80-85c water
4. Stir
5. Press gently
Obviously the quality and freshness of the coffee beans matters too, and you can vary the immersion time for the strength of the coffee you want.
Don't bother with this. The seal created by the plunger is good enough to stop the flow of coffee. Insert the plunger at an angle so that you push out as much air as possible before straightening it out.
I’ve never understood the resistance to inverted brewing - with 200g of water, it’s trivial to make it work with minimal-to-no risk of an accident upon inversion.
Wait, what? The standard method is to put coffee into the Areopress right way up.
Having tried upside down and right side up immersion, I can’t say it makes much difference either way. In which case, I’d rather not have a top heavy vessel of hot water on the counter.
It also has the advantage of being able to inspect how the filter is seated before you proceed. I’ve had instances where the filter is not seated properly and excessive agitation manages to unseat the filter. If you reuse filters (and I taste no reason not to), I observe that the filters bunch up a little bit more with reuse.
Anyway, I don’t mean to say that you can’t invert things. But taste-wise, inverted brewing may have no clear advantages if you just want a nice coffee.
>5. Press gently
Does not compute?
A full grown adult standing with their full weight on their Aeropress can achieve about 4 bar of pressure; standing at the counter, pressing with one arm as hard as I can, I'm unlikely to achieve more than 1 bar. For context, an espresso traditionally requires 9 bar to properly extract. It's doubtful that that even 1 bar of pressure makes any difference to extraction at all.
But assuming that it does, and you think that pressure is a good thing - why on Earth would you instruct people to press "gently"? Now you're looking at more like 0.1 bar of pressure. That's definitely negligible, certainly not "high pressure" or even "relatively high".
I said the aeropress combined immersion and high pressure. What is 'high' is obviously relative, as I just qualified.
I did not say the higher the pressure the better, which is obvious enough from the fact I prefer using an aeropress to an espresso machine.
Aeropress FAQ:
"The AeroPress filter is 2.5 inches in diameter so the area of the filter is 4.9 square inches. If you press down firmly on a scale, it is relatively easy to get the scale up to 25 pounds and then if you press hard on the scale, you can certainly get it up to 50 pounds. Therefore if you press similarly hard on your AeroPress while brewing coffee, the firm pressing will be at 5.1 psi (25 lbs/4.9 sq in) and the harder pressing will be at 10.2 psi (50 lbs/4.9 sq in). Since a bar of pressure is 14.7 psi, the former is .35 bar and the latter is .70 bar."
https://www.aeropress.co.uk/pages/faqs
See also James Hoffman's experiment:
This year I finally “upgraded” and bought a Niche grinder and reverse osmosis water system with instant boiling water (Osmosis Zero). Mostly for convenience rather than taste. But still using the Aeropress.
My Aeropress recipe is taken from some champion winning recipe and I’ve used it for years:
- Inverted Aeropress
- Fill with boiling water to heat it up
- Grind one scoop of beans (18g)
- Pour hot water from Aeropress into mug to warm mug
- Put grind into Aeropress
- Pour a small amount of boiling water in and stir to wet grind
- Start 2 min timer at same time as pouring in
- At 1:40 fill up Aeropress rest of way, put on filter and cap
- Let sit to 0:50 and pour out mug while waiting
- Invert Aeropress and put on mug
- Slowly press out coffee over the last 50s
- Done!
Regular coffee you bloom so channels don’t form for all the water to run down.
With the Aeropress, the coffee foams and could foam over if you fill it, so blooming first let’s you stir the bubbles out and then top it off.
https://fellowproducts.com/products/prismo/
You also don't have to bother with inverting with this metal filter.
Aeropress is also my favourite method. It's easy to experiment with the main variables than most other devices - water temperature, grind size, immersion time, coffee/water ratio. I find better than the French press - and I think the main factor is that you add some pressure to the process. Aeropress is also easier to clean.
Scoop of coffee, grind, add, pour in some water from a boiled kettle, stir, wait for a minute or three, invert, press.
Here is a weird coffee person succinctly explaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6VlT_jUVPc
Might have to give that a try.
I started noticing differences in beans when hand grinding. Some are tough, and feel like trying to grind rocks. Some churn like butter. I'm not smart enough to know why, but that led to me buying the 'butter' varieties.
Best I've found yet is Red Bird coffee. Easy to grind and tastes awesome. Hardest to grind was Happy Mug, closely followed by SW. Guatemalan is our favorite, so same country of origin for all 3. (All 3 taste great, only referring to ease of grind).
But the variety and growing altitude also affect density. A high grown East African seed could be much more dense (and thus harder to grind) than a low altitude Guatemalan.
I also enjoy digging into the science of coffee brewing, though - finding out how exactly changing method, temperature, grind size, and brew time change the relative ratios of compounds extracted. There's still a lot of disagreement about the effect of temperature, for example (most experts say temp should be kept higher, while a minority of hobbyists go for lower temperature sometimes). It's a nerdy hobby.
This leaves bean choice, brewing time and grind size. Are there some really basic fool proof values to start with here?
https://elegantcoffee.com/coffee-grind-size-brewing-methods/
It’s almost like a wind-up.
I also don’t know if my grinder is any good. I only know it was expensive.
Even more fundamentally, it would help if I could drink some aeropress coffee made by someone who knew what they were doing.
I find the James Hoffmann french press technique - basically stir, break the crust, and let time and gravity do the work produces a far nicer cup of coffee:
Their Aergrind is designed to fit in the middle of an AeroPress and is extremely well made, so perfect for travelling with.
And a SMEG water kettle(0) with temperature settings. I use 90C for almost all coffee.
The real trick is to find the optimal beans, Lavazza and Segafredo work best for me