One of my favorite features of my preferred coffee brewer is how you can chuck it in a suitcase or a backpack and take it on a trip. When you get where you’re going, be that a Chicago hotel room, 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 might already recognize this as the AeroPress, a brewer invented by Alan Adler, the same guy who came up with—of all things—the Aerobie flying disc. The AeroPress, which debuted in 2005, looks like a giant, needle-less syringe, in which you combine grounds and hot water, stir, wait a bit, then depress the plunger to push brewed coffee through a 2.5-inch circular paper filter and directly into your mug.
There’s a bit of ritual to it, but it’s quick and efficient compared to the relatively fussy demands of pour-over coffee. If your beans are good, you can make café-quality coffee at home.
Unsurprising for something created by an inventor, the AeroPress is a tinkerer’s delight, and part of its magic is the breadth of what you can do with it and how you can do it.
In the wonderful home brewing guide, Craft Coffee, author Jessica Easto lauds its incredible versatility: “There are dozens and dozens of AeroPress recipes. Unlike some other devices, it seems to work well with any number of grind sizes, brewing times, and water temperatures.”
The “dozens and dozens” of recipes Easto referred to when her book came out in 2017 is now hundreds and perhaps even thousands. The internet is rich with AeroPress fan clubs and experts like James Hoffmann, which will help get you going, then scratch the nerdy itch when it arises.
Play around and you can come up with cups that mimic French press, automatic brewers, cold brew, and pour-over. With an accessory called a flow control cap, you can even make something that vaguely resembles espresso.
I certainly take advantage of this flexibility if I need to adjust for a roasting style or grind size, yet for all of this, most people tend to find a favorite brew method and stick with it.
In Alder’s still-classic method, you put the filter and filter cap on the brewing chamber, set it over a mug, add the grounds, set a timer, pour water over the top, stir, and depress the plunger when the time’s up. You control grind size, water temperature and volume, and brew time, the major waypoints on the path to great coffee. Finer grind sizes, for example, tend to call for a shorter brew time. Darker roasts usually taste better with lower water temperatures. My current jam is a medium-ground dark roast, brewing two minutes in water that’s 190 degrees Fahrenheit.
I like what’s called the inverted method, where the barrel sits on top of the plunger for brewing, and when time’s up, you screw on the cap and filter, flip it onto your mug, and depress. It requires a degree of confidence and expertise that gives the company the willies—AeroPress spills tend to be rare but disastrous and they do not recommend inverting—but once you get the hang of it, the method is clean and precise.
