Not a fan. Was looking for something that gave me a superb cup of coffee, and everyone was talking about this so why not, right?
But no, after a few weeks I just don’t get the hype. Let me start:
1) It is an utter faff. Usual coffee procedure pre-aeropress days was: put coffee in press, add water, wait a few minutes, plunge, drink. Nice. Aeropress procedure: Unpack multitude of daft accompaniments, ensure coffee grains are of adequate size and quantity, put filter in housing, slosh hot water on filter, add coffee to press, add water to press, stir, add more water, screw filter on, wait, plunge, clean up silly accoutrements, drink thimbleful of coffee. Sighhhhh.
2) Quantity. Now I don’t know how they do things in ‘muhrica, but I had assumed that a nation that likes it’s things super-sized and its trucks ‘monster’ would give me a lot of coffee. After all, as they never stop telling us, they are the land of coffee (helloooo central and Latin America? Nope, not you). But guys, seriously, what constitutes “a cup of coffee” for you? One aeropress done the way the instructions tell me (add coffee, add twice coffee amount in water or whatever) gives me a third of a mug. A third. A Third. You add water or milk to make an Americano but you can’t add too much or you’d have dilute pond water so it still only fills half a mug watered down. Is it my mugs? They look kinda normal-size to me and buying a whole new kitchen set just to make the aeropress look good is not what I had in mind, I just want some nice coffee. A third? Strewth. So next time I filled the press to the top and I get half a mug. Wooo. Plus half our mugs are too big to fit the cursed thing on top of it anyway, which is a good indicator that you’re dealing with a child’s size coffee dispenser. Gahhh.
3) Method. Buy this and your surfaces will be swimming under spilled coffee. I do my research, “drip-fine ground”, whatever that means. So I grind ze beans - which is every bit as exhausting but not half as saucy as you think it is - and get my fine ground. Perfect. I add my water to the- drip drip drip pourrrr... wait wut? Why is there water coming out? Huh? “Hello google why do I suck at aeropress?”. The beans, silly - they must be finer! Finer you fool, curse you! Grind them you dog! So back to the grindstone I go to produce some brown talcum powder with the occasional crumb. Brings new meaning to the phrase, “the daily grind” heh. Again, drippity-drippity-drip-drop. Sigh. So I find the “inverted method” which, let’s be frank, is just a bandaid trying to hide an obvious flaw. So I do that, get coffee everywhere and narrowly escape third-degree burns of hot water running out the sides and I get my mug/thimble. So great, buy an aeropress and then the only way to make it work is to buy a £200 burr grinder where I can set the size to the micrometer or do circus tricks with a wobbly aeropress filled with scalding water, for a ignominiously tiny cup of, okay I’ll admit it was quite smooth and nice, coffee. You can master the inverted method fairly quickly so you don’t have to redecorate the kitchen and head to a ‘rona-infested A&E each time you use it, but it’s still a bandaid. Is it meant to drip through? No, otherwise it’ll just be a drip-coffee dispenser and we could all throw away the press and just be done with it. The press is, like, the point and besides “Aerodrip” just sounds disturbing.
4) The help. When you’re stuck, surrounded by pools of coffee and coffee grains spattered all over the walls, you can retreat to the internet for user tips (typed with scalded fingers). There you will find no end of handy user videos or “recipes” (“stir for 25.368 seconds - this is the most vital step and you will need to get that atomic clock out of the back of the cupboard to calculate it”). They’re not recipes guys, just stop it, no-one’s buying that. Here online Marlon or Jeff (or Waynemo) with their spade beards and elaborately-waxed curly moustaches that just look silly (ya’ll know what I’m talking about) but please no-one tell them as it’ll hurt their feelings, will tell you the “Quickest way to use aeropress” which all - ironically in light of their being “quick and easy” - involve two separate weighing scales, a barometer to check the air pressure and a CTD to test the pressure, density, temperature and chemical content of the water in content. “Then pour out 8oz of water”, okay do you want me to adjust for salinity, altitude and current atmospheric pressure? Okay so I’m now pouring water into my upside-down aeropress which is finely balanced on my electric scales and....oh what have I become. Sorry guys, I’ll leave you to sit around talking about coffee-oils while I just slosh in my just-boiled water and not the desired amount of 88.7 degrees because, let’s face it, I just want a hot cup of coffee and not a temp vs time science experiment.
Anyway, to conclude. It’s a coffee gadget. Yes, it makes a nice cup of coffee but it doesn’t actually make very much at all and heaven forbid you might want to make coffee for more than one Borrower-sized person at a time. It’s a gadget that gives a mouthful of coffee. It’s a faff and the only way to make it work properly is to laser-print your own coffee grains at the right size (but not too fine, dammit, because that makes Mr Aeropress sad also!!!) or precariously use it upside down (why is that the fix when it was designed to work right-side-up? Are they not....amending the design?). It’ll take ten times longer to make a cup of coffee and another ten cleaning up the surfaces and chasing all the accessories around the kitchen and for all of it you get a hiccup of coffee. So I’ll return to my French Press as if it were a long-lost friend, and if anyone wants a crude plastic tube, a spoon, a t-shaped stirring implement and an unrecyclable plastic thing that exists purely to hold filter papers, you’ll find one in the landfill.
| Brand | Aeropress |
|---|---|
| Colour | Black |
| Material | Ceramic, Plastic |
