Gadgets :: Brewing at Home :: Aeropress

It is tough to make coffeehouse quality coffee at home; this is a sentiment that echos through my daily conversations with coffee enthusiasts from owners and operators of highly successful coffee businesses to the average joe (no pun intended). I hear you folks, and I agree. For years I've been a strong proponent of brewing home coffee in a French Press--but lets call it a Press Pot from now on shall we? The press pot is no more French than the "French" Fry or the "French" Horn. The press pot, as most would agree, makes a stellar cup of coffee but there are two major draw-backs; There is sludge at the bottom of every cup and clean up is messy and all together obnoxious. Brewing coffee in the press pot becomes a chore and finally we all end up going out to the local shop or settling for inferior brew from that fell fallowed kitchen kermudgen, Mr. Coffee.

Folks, there is a solution, a savior if you will, a long time friend of the tea drinker converted to the dark side of coffee cultism. This angel of quality home coffee is the Aeropress.
A few weeks ago a friend, and fellow coffee enthusiast let me borrow his coffee making device. He had been talking it up for some time and I was somewhat embarrassed that I had no idea exactly what he was talking about. I received a bag full of bits and pieces that, to the unknowing eye, would have been taken as some sort of drug paraphanalia involving water, gravity and smoke. In all honesty, the technology isn't all that different. So I experimented with this contraption and I will stand behind this until proven otherwise, the aeropress makes the best cup of coffee possible at home with the least amount of clean-up. Best of all, they're easy to purchase and quite inexpensive. A google search will reveal a million places to buy one but here is one on Amazon for under $26.00. I took a step by step pictoral approach to introducing the aeropress and how it works, take a look!


Mis en Place :: Gather your ingredients and all of your parts and pieces. Today I used a Northern Italian style espresso roast, I find the blend and lighter roast make a very nice press pot coffee so I figured it would translate well here too.




Grind :: If you read back to my post on grinding you'll know that I prefer professional grinders to home use grinders, today I used a Malkonig Guatemala Lab Grinder which costs several thousand dollars. If you'd like to buy one I'd be happy to sell it to you! That aside, I prefer a standard cone filter grind for the aeropress because the slightly finer grind adds body to the final cup; don't worry, there is a small paper filter to reduce the sludge factor.




Base :: Coffee goes in the base on a small paper disc-filter.








Water :: Place the base over the cup and fill with "off-boil" water. Water should be 185-200F depending on the bean. At home this means "off-boil" which is bringing your tea pot to a boil, taking it off the eye to let sit for about a minute and then pouring it over the coffee. Give it a good stir and then press!




Enjoy :: You get an amazingly flavorful cup of coffee with almost no sludge and the clean up is simply dumping the dry coffee puck in the compost and washing off the plastic pieces!