I got an Aeropress for Christmas. The Aeropress bills itself as an espresso machine. As long as you don’t need/want crema, it is. If you think a lack of crema and espresso are mutually exculsive, think of the Aeropress as a way to make a deleciously strong tiny cup of coffee.
Here’s how it works: you put coffee in the main part, above a paper filter, which is, in turn, on top of the cup you’re going to drink out of. You pour in hot water the top, stir it a bit, then use a plunger to force the water through the coffee and filter. Besides heating up the water (which you can do in the microwave pretty quickly, since you’re only doing 2-4 shots worth), it takes less than 30 seconds.
There’s a lot to like about the Aeropress. First of all, the (pseudo) espresso it makes is really good. I mean, REALLY good. You get that tingly, sharp rich espresso taste in a really strong way. Compare $20 for an Aeropress to $100+ for a bearable espresso machine, and it’s not too hard a decision.
Second, it’s fast. If you add in the water heating time, we’re MAYBE talking about 2 minutes, although it’s probably more like 60-90 seconds. Compare that to a French press–it’s at least 10 minutes from when I start heating the water till when I’ve got coffee.
Third, clean-up is awesome. You can use the plunger to punch the puck right out. While it’s making the coffee, the pluger catches all the coffee along the walls of the carafe, so it’s mostly already clean. The pluger and carafe are made out of some fancy plastic, kind of feels like Lexan or something smoother, so not much coffee oil sits on them.
Take the pluger and carafe and lid apart, rinse them out, a little soap on the lid, rinse the paper filter out if you want to use it again, and you’re done. Unlike a real espresso machine, particularly my pump machine, you can make multiple shots right away–there’s nothing to cool down or dig out.
Fourth, it’s very portable. It’s hard, durable plastic, so it travels well, and it doesn’t plug in, so you can take it just about anywhere. You’ll need coffee, of course, but that’s about it. The instructions even say you can heat the water inside the plunger in the microwave (although that makes me nervous that I’ll ruin my pluger seal).
Fifth, it’s pretty versatile. You can make espresso, or water the espresso down for a nice cup of regular coffee. I did this with my dad over Christmas–I made two shots and drank one straight, while he watered his down into a big mug of coffee. We both loved it.
There’s only a couple bad things:
- It takes a little more coffee than a normal machine. The included scoop is about twice the size of a normal scoop (one scoop per shot). That means going through coffee faster.
- The filters are paper, and thus disposable. They said they did a lot of blind tasting and everybody preferred the paper filters, but I prefer my coffee gadgets to have no disposable parts, mostly b/c it means I have to buy something new down the road. The package came with over 200 new filters and a cute little holder for them, but I would have liked a metail filter, even if it meant more cleaning.
- I haven’t been able, yet, to stop the water from dripping into the cup before I start plunging it. I would think the more water pushed via pressurization through the coffee, the more taste I’d get. Right now, as soon as I pour water in, it starts to drip through the coffee into the cup. I’m not a fan of that–maybe I need to try a finer grind.
Overall, the Aeropress is a fantastic little device. I’ve been saying I was going to try to make a DIY espresso machine for a while, probably out of a caulk gun, but this works on exactly the same principle, is simpler and more elegant, and has substantially less chance of spraying boiling water in my face.
I don’t know if it’ll become the default for my morning coffee–I really do love the thickness of a French press (and the fact that it’s not a tiny shot, so it stays hot longer and is just overall more to drink). But it probably will replace the Nalgene press as my travel coffee maker, and maybe the moka pot as my default way to make espresso.
