What's the lastest on Aero Press?

[roastingnerd]

The Aeropress has been the goto method for my wife and I.  I add enough coffee to make 6 measures in a finer than drip grind.  That is accomplished with the Breville smart grinder which can be set to amount as well as fineness.  I store my beans in the upper hopper.  I use a paper filter.  We have a small teapot that holds 3 2/3 mugs.  Brew with hot water from an instant hot water dispenser near our sink.  Water is 190* max.  Add water up to the 3 cup mark while counting 1001, 1002 all the way to 1010.  Press into the pot.  Turn on the disposer and press the filter and grounds in.  Rinse under the running water and stick into the drying rack.  Add more hot water to fill the pot.  Stir and pour.  My wife drinks 1/2 mug and I drink the rest.  This is good for me because, although it takes a lot of words to describe, it is so simple.  Everyone who has tasted the coffee says they have never tasted such good coffee in their lives.
I also use an espresso machine when we want a real jolt.  Brews a sharper flavor.

[rasqual]

Hmm.

The Aeropress is beyond dispute the most flexible conventional brewing device around. It's a sport plane.

Personally, I generally use a pourover. It's a Cessna. It gets me where I want to go with no hassle.

The Aeropress, on the other hand, is a sport plane that taps your knowledge and experience, and demands that you make good use of it. You can do amazing things with it -- or utterly screw up (as I did at the first CoffeeCon, terribly under-extracting for sample consumption while I had the SCAA brewing chart projected on the wall).

There are particular, unusual use cases where nothing else could possibly produce what's wanted. Most of the time, I don't need that functionality. But when I do, I've found that I just can't do certain things with any other method.

The device is also good in times of doubt. If you're stuck using a weird grinder somewhere, for example, you can get yourself in trouble if a pourover stalls because the proportion of fines was unusually high. Not so with the Aero. You'll still suffer extraction issues from the inconsistency of the grind, but you won't have to worry about stalling a filter. In a sense, if you're in unfamiliar territory an Aeropress can be a shaman's bag of tricks, allowing adaptation on the fly.

Definitely a geek device.

[NightFlight]

Nice description Rasqual. I love the aeropress and use it often; but who you callin' a geek 

[rasqual]

Hmm. What cunning exploits is the Rasqual up to?

[BoldJava]

Hmm. What cunning exploits is the Rasqual up to?

Like a Phoenix rising from the skyscrapers of Chi-town...

[jano]

Storage of the device is awkward.  They don't want you keeping the plunger inside the unit, so I don't, and it takes up twice the space.  The roundness of it prevents me from piling stuff atop it, or putting it atop something other than a shelf. 

I also don't understand how people put 250g of water in when it's inverted.  I barely can get just over 210g, then it spills over.  Maybe I should check my water source to make sure they're not feeding me heavy water.   

[peter]

Storage of the device is awkward.  They don't want you keeping the plunger inside the unit, so I don't, and it takes up twice the space.  The roundness of it prevents me from piling stuff atop it, or putting it atop something other than a shelf. 

I also don't understand how people put 250g of water in when it's inverted.  I barely can get just over 210g, then it spills over.  Maybe I should check my water source to make sure they're not feeding me heavy water.   

Use stale coffee so it doesn't bloom as much.

[rasqual]

Storage of the device is awkward.  They don't want you keeping the plunger inside the unit, so I don't, and it takes up twice the space.  The roundness of it prevents me from piling stuff atop it, or putting it atop something other than a shelf. 

Hmm. They mean just don't have the plunger's widest end inside the tube. The length of the plunger, however, permits you to leave that widest part about 1/32" outside the tube.

There are some relatively subtle design aspects of the relation between the lengths of the tube and the plunger that bear on optimal use of the device vis-a-vis cleaning between brews at a farmers market (or coffee shop) where the device is in constant use. Intimate familiarity with the device throws few design deficiencies into relief. They really did think things through pretty well.

I'm still concerned about the rubber formulation for inverted pressing. That's one of the handful of concerns I share with Adler.

[rasqual]

Hmm. What cunning exploits is the Rasqual up to?

Like a Phoenix rising from the skyscrapers of Chi-town...

I just finished "cupping" 18 coffees of the 23 I roasted to serve at a friend's (well, our CEO) fish fry tomorrow. Mostly I was trying to identify which ones I didn't want to serve -- cupping for defects, kind of. I used the Aeropress entirely conventionally, with the exception that I used polyester rounds I cut out last night. Note: these are NOT felt. Years ago a manufacturer sent me a partial roll of high quality spun filtering polyester in error when I'd asked for felt. At the time I was working with the 5 micron polyester felt (which I still consider the best filtering medium for any coffee brewing use whatsoever) and wasn't all that interested. But now I've been playing with it, and it definitely produces a cup similar to the felt -- turbid but lacking in fines. The turbidity, I believe, is legitimate "body" (I consider talk of "body" attributable to fines to be utterly WRONG).

Yada yada. Anyway, I think I'll use these filters at the fish fry. I cut a LOT of 'em.

[BoldJava]

...
Yada yada. Anyway, I think I'll use these filters at the fish fry. I cut a LOT of 'em.

Bread them and deep fry them.  Fish 'n chips.

[rasqual]

Bread them and deep fry them.  Fish 'n chips.

The "chips" thing doesn't fall too far off course, I'm afraid.