Aeropress — Understanding the brew method

It appears that almost everybody loves the Aeropress. Let’s take a peek into why that is.

Filter Options

The type of filter you use to brew your coffee will affect what ends up in the cup. The standard filter that you receive with your Aeropress is, in my opinion, the best to use.

There are other options out there – mostly stainless steel disks with different porosity levels and just recently a contraption called the Prismo was released- which has a pressure actuated valve and is said to build up more pressure producing an extraction closer to that of espresso. See a write up by Cape Coffee Beans here.

Metal filters allow more bean fiber and oils through into your cup. This increases body and buffers acids. Aroma potential can increase too, as aroma compounds get carried through with the oils in your brew.

Paper filters on the other hand filter out the solids producing a cup with a lower oil and bean fiber level. So you’ll get the opposite of what you’ll experience with metal filters, and most notably an accentuation of the acids inherent in the coffee.

Regular and Inverted

Brewing inverted ( upside-down) allows you to use full immersion as your brewing dynamic as well as letting you control your extraction time a little more tightly.

Brewing regular is a little tricky, depending what you’re planning to achieve. If you’re looking for a drip/filter style brew with the intention of using gravity/ percolation as your major brewing dynamic then you can do that.Or you can extract a ‘short and heavy’ (as I like to call it) by using 16.5g of coffee to 55g of water and lots of pressure, ending up with a 20 sec total extraction time. The world is your oyster- there are literally hundreds of ideas for brew recipes with the Aeropress.

Turbulence

Stirring. shaking, and flipping are all possible.

These are actions you might want to perform only to intentionally affect the extraction rate and efficacy. As a rule coffee takes longer to extract with a lower water temperature, but you can make it extract quicker by adding turbulence to the brew. Be wary, as it’s a little difficult to predict. Take note of the amount of times you add turbulence to the brew  if you want to reproduce your extraction. Notice bitterness or unpleasant astringency? You might find that stirring your coffee less vigorously will produce better results. It’s all about tweaking the extraction.

As an interesting aside – turbulence also allows us to change brew water temperature to our advantage when thinking of modulating acids in the brew.

Conclusion

The Aeropress is unparalleled. It’s tough, compact and fairly cheap for what it can do. Pair it with a hand grinder and you have yourself the quintessential home and travel setup. Two birds with one stone.

Until next time.

For a Aeropress brew guide click here.

Buy your Aeropress from Origin De Waterkant or Maboneng R699