This board seems to be a well-caffeinated bunch so I’ll ask here. I’m fifty-something and have beat alcohol and tobacco (pat self on back, knock on wood, one day at a time, yadda yadda) so coffee is pretty much the only vice I have left. The day the doc tells me I have to give up coffee will be the day I die.
Full disclosure: I like coffee. Nay, I love coffee. I live in Washington (state) outside of Seattle, and it’s pretty much a religion here. (An aside: smart coffee drinkers here hate Starbucks!) I average about a quart of French press coffee per day but I also loves me some espresso every now and then however I’m not about to go out and purchase an esspresso machine for counter space and cost reasons. Besides, I don’t care about the milk stuff so the frothing attachment would be pretty much tits on a boar for me. No mochachino, cappuchino, frappachino, Al Pacino for me. I just want the sweet, sweet nectar of the gods.
The latest coffee thread got me thinking, how can recreate the espresso experience at home without buying some huge machine and dropping hundreds of dollars? Some googling led me to AeroPress.
Thoughts? Opinions? And most importantly, alternatives?
Pros
It makes great coffee
the apparatus is easy to clean
It’s very simple to use
It makes great coffee
Cons
Uses more grinds than traditional machines
Coffee needs to be ground just so; this may take some experimenting on your part.
Can only make 1 cup at a time.
Uses a specialized filter you can only get from the manufacturer (but they give you a lot of free ones to start)
Thanks for the detailed response. That helps. Not happy about the custom filter but I guess I can live with that. 1 cup of espresso is good for me, not so good for company.
You put the unit on top of the cup you want to fill right? I could see the cup shooting out from underneath it if the plunger is pressed at a bit of an angle.
I’m just thinking of times that my french press was hard to plunge because I put too much coffee in. Sometimes I had to really lean on it to get it all the way down.
The thing does make good coffee but there is something different about it that is not really to my liking, perhaps that lack of bitterness / acidity goldmund mentioned.
I sometimes use a small french press, but overall, I like the one cup cone (Melitta style) coffee maker the best. Still, I’d say the AeroPress is worth trying; you might like it.
I’m thinking a stable cup (with the geometry of a right cylinder) and not some tea cup shape where the base is smaller than the top.
When my french press is hard to plunge it’s usually because I ground the coffee too fine and the tiny particles get stuck in the filter. What I find intriguing about the Aeropress is that because it uses a microfilter, one can use a finer grind than a french press would allow.
This is what I’m afraid of. I buy the thing and it turns out I don’t care for it and return to the french press. I’m out $30 and left with another piece of crap in the house.
I’m going to see it there are any coffee shops around that use it so I can try before I buy. What I’m really trying to do is recreate the espresso experience at home without buying an espresso machine.
I hope you realize that an espresso machine is more than $25. The Aeropress has been compared in terms of coffee making quality to the Clover, a commercial grade espresso machine which costs $11,000. There’s no doubt that an Aeropress makes espresso about 1,000times better than a cheap espresso machine. I have both so I can safely say that.
I can’t stand acidity in my coffee, so obviously I have a particular affinity for the results the Aeropress yields. If for some reason you love sour, acrid tastes in your coffee, you might want to avoid it.
I’m an espresso fanatic. I’ve invested more than $1K in equipment to make decent ones at home (grinder, higher end machine with post-manufacture mods, extra portafilter baskets, decent tamper.)
Having said that, I’d encourage you to consider a moka pot. It makes a beverage that’s not completely unlike espresso, does it fairly simply and economically, does it better than a lot, if not most espresso machines out there, and makes enough for two or even more people.
We’ve been using ours for about 8-9 months, I bought another one for the office, and I gave several out for Xmas gifts. I’ve bought an extra pack of filters once, they last forever (BTW, if you want to go all out, you can rinse the paper disks out and re-use them).
An advantage over the French Press is that the coffee doesn’t stay in contact with the grounds, picking up the more bitter fraction. It’s quicker and cleans up more simply than almost any other system except maybe a single-cup drip filter, but it makes much better coffee. Though it only makes a cup at a time, it’s quick and easy enough that there’s no problem.
We buy our coffee from Peet’s, and the perfect grind seems to be #10. The few times we’ve bought pre-ground coffee at the supermarket it has worked nicely as well.
I would compare the result with a good cup of espresso, which can be diluted to make an americano.
so I’ll ask here. I’m fifty-something and have beat alcohol and tobacco (pat self on back, knock on wood, one day at a time, yadda yadda) so coffee is pretty much the only vice I have left. The day the doc tells me I have to give up coffee will be the day I die.
The Aeropress has been compared in terms of coffee making quality to the Clover, a commercial grade espresso machine which costs $11,000. There’s no doubt that an Aeropress makes espresso about 1,000times better than a cheap espresso machine. I have both so I can safely say that.