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One of my own My favorite features my favorite Coffee maker It’s the way you can put it in a suitcase or backpack and take it on a trip. When you get to where you want to go, whether it’s a hotel room in Chicago, a mountaintop campsite, or your mother-in-law’s house, as long as you’ve brought beans and have access to hot water, you’ll have what you need for an excellent cup of joe.
Coffee lovers may already recognize this as Aeropressa brewer Invented by Alan Adlerthe same man who invented – of all things – the Aerobie flying disc. The AeroPress, which debuted in 2005, looks like a giant needleless syringe, combining ground coffee and hot water, stirring, waiting a bit, then pressing the plunger to push the brewed coffee through a 2.5-inch round paper filter directly into your mug.
There are a few rituals to it, but they are quick and effective compared to the relatively difficult requirements Pour coffee. If your coffee beans are good, you can make café-quality coffee at home.
Not surprisingly for something created by an inventor, the AeroPress is a delight for tinkerers, and part of its charm is the breadth of what you can do with it and how you can do it.
In The Great Home Brewing Guide, Kraft coffeeauthor Jessica Easto praises its amazing versatility: “There are dozens and dozens of AeroPress recipes out there. And unlike some other machines, it seems to work well with any number of grind sizes, brewing times, and water temperatures.”
The “dozens and dozens” of recipes that Easto referred to when her book came out in 2017 now number in the hundreds, perhaps thousands. The Internet is rich with AeroPress fan clubs and experts such as James Hoffmanwhich will help you move forward, and then scratch the annoying itch when it appears.
Play around and you can come up with mugs that mimic French presses, automatic brewers, cold brews, and pour-overs. With an extension called A Flow control capyou can also make something that vaguely resembles espresso.
I definitely take advantage of this flexibility if I need to adjust to the roasting style or grind size, but with all that said, most people tend to find a preferred brew method and stick with it.
Photography: Michael Calor
Aeropress
Coffee maker, original
In the still-classic Alder method, you place the filter and filter cover on the brewing chamber, place it over the cup, add the ground coffee, set the timer, pour water over the top, stir, and press the plunger when the time is up. You can control grind size, water temperature and volume, and brew time, which are key waypoints on the path to great coffee. For example, finer grind sizes tend to require a shorter preparation time. Dark roasts usually taste better with lower water temperatures. My current jam is a medium dark roast, brewed for 2 minutes in 190°F water.
I like what it’s called Inverse methodwhere the barrel sits On top From the press to brew, and when the time comes, you can install the lid and filter, flip it over your cup, and press it. It takes a degree of trust and experience that gives the company the will — AeroPress spills tend to be rare but catastrophic and I don’t recommend the opposite — but once you get the hang of it, the method is clean and precise.