So here I want to tell you my thoughts on the Aeropress. I think it is a good brewing device and I believe it has opened up an avenue for experimentation of coffee brewing that lends us a lot of creativity.

First, what is the Aeropress? This, from their website:

So the basic method we use for brewing coffee with the Aeropress is like this. Put the filter in the filter holder and put it in place, then rinse it with hot water. Take 28g fresh-roasted DoubleShot Coffee and grind it fine. Finer than drip. Sometimes we take it from the espresso grinder. That type of grind (but our espresso grind is a lot coarser than most because we tamp hard). Fill the plunger up to number 3 with hot (195 degree) water before you grind the coffee. It can sit and cool for a bit. Grind the coffee, pour it through the funnel into the syringe, add the water from the plunger. No need to wait around. Stir right off, put the plunger in and plunge hard all the way to the bottom. If you ground it fine enough you'll have to plunge like we tamp. Hard. Oh yeah, make sure the Aeropress is on top of a sturdy cup and make sure you threw out the water you used to rinse the filter. That's it. Drink up. Yum.

We've been messing around with the inverted method. I've tried to use the same parameters we use to make a presspot (28g coffee ground coarse in water 4 min, then plunge), but that didn't work. The idea was to invert the Aeropress and use it as a presspot, then turn it right-side-up and plunge so that it would become a super clean, filtered presspot.

I was thinking about using a different model.

Check this out. The Aeropress uses the same general factors to brew coffee as the siphon brewer and the infamous $11,000 Clover. Air pressure. The sipon and the Clover both suck. The Aeropress blows. It's a difference of positive and negative air pressure.

I spoke with a mechanical engineering professor this morning about this because I had some technical questions. Here's what I found out. It doesn't matter whether a device is using positive or negative air pressure to brew. It is the same. He thought pulling (vacuum) would be less reliable because the air can act as a cushion, and I suspect as the coffee is ground finer and finer, the resistance that applies would increase the force needed to pull the water through the grounds and the elasticity of air would be more of a factor. Which made me think.... Pushing, like the Aeropress does, might be a more effective and reliable and repeatable method... if you try to get the cushion of air out out of the chamber and rest the plunger rubber against the top of the fluid.

Every time I've had coffee from a siphon, it has been bad. Too hot. Brewed too hot. Overextracted and nasty. I've never seen anyone make a siphon in a way that made sense to me... until recently. I watched a video of a guy from Intelli. And when I watched it, I was impressed with the method he used. Watch the video and look for this: instead of letting the siphon dictate the temp at which he's brewing the coffee, he manipulates the water in the top of the siphon to inject air and decrease the temp to an acceptable level BEFORE adding the ground coffee. This is key. Brewing too hot is fatal to a good coffee. Here's the link to the video: http://www.vimeo.com/8977253

I think the Aeropress can work the same as this. I need to go back and experiment with the parameters used in this video and play with the grind size until I think the coffee is good. But the method is basically the same. Add the water and ground coffee together (in the inverted press with the plunger just barely inserted and the filter off), stir, and use air pressure to push through a filter.

So back to my dream. When I woke up at 2a, I was thinking about the clover. The clover is a machine that was created to make one cup at a time in coffeehouses. It was an automated sucking Aeropress. The Aerosuck, they could've called it. It had a water spout pointing into a piston which lowered in the beginning to create a well. The barista would grind coffee and program the clover to dispense water at a particular temperature into the ground coffee. The barista would stir and the coffee would steep for a period of time (few seconds or a minute, I forget) and the piston would begin to rise, creating a vacuum beneath it that sucked the brewed coffee liquid through a filter, leaving the spent grounds on top of the machine to be squeegeed away into the rubbish bin. So suddenly at 2a I thought, we could use the Aeropress just like the clover! We could mix water and ground coffee in a receptacle, then put the Aeropress on top and pull the plunger UP to suck the brewed coffee through the filter, leaving the grounds beneath. Of course, that's ridiculous. Well, I haven't tried it yet. But I suspect the filter would not stay in place. Which is the rest of my night's dreaming. We could reinforce the filter holder with a gasket to help keep the filter in place. We'd pretty much have to immerse the Aeropress into the bottom of the coffee brewing receptacle. I was dreaming that we could somehow hook up a hose to the bottom of the Aeropress. But, as you can see, the whole dream was kind of a ridiculous attempt at making the Aeropress into the Aerosuck, or a manual clover.

Which led me to the question, does it make a difference whether your using positive or negative air pressure? And my mechanical engineering friend says, "No... for the most part." He claims they are the same force. Which I figured.

So I'm back to pushing the water through the Aeropress.

Today I did another experiment. Because my trial of using the inverted Aeropress as a presspot and flipping it at 4 minutes didn't work, I decided to do the two things separately to see if there was an effect on taste. So I brewed a presspot of coffee (Sumatra Aceh Gold) and poured a little into a cup. Then I poured some into the Aeropress (right side up) and pressed the presspot-brewed coffee through the paper filter. It tasted good. Much like the coffee brewed by the presspot. Then I took the filter paper off to find a muddy muck of coffee sludge. I wiped it off with my finger and it felt like toothpaste. And there was a surprising amount of it. It tasted bitter and gritty and dry, but not terrible. Just a weird consistency. I wonder if that is some of the fats from the presspot coffee. For kicks I poured some of that filtered coffee into the Aeropress for a second filtering and the second time I found a tiny bit of sludge. The only difference in the cups I can detect from presspot through both filterings of the Aeropress is in mouthfeel. The more it's filtered, the more it seems to lose some viscosity.

So my question became this: what is the difference between using the Aeropress chamber as a presspot and using a presspot and then pouring the brewed coffee into the Aeropress. The result is drastically different, and the only thing I can think is that the pressure used to push the water through the filter is acting upon the ground coffee to overextract it when left to steep 4 minutes. The solution to this, of course, is to either increase grind size or amount of ground coffee or to reduce water temp, volume, or steeping time. All of this brings us back to our original brewing method though, of pouring in the water and coffee, stirring straightaway, and plunging without delay. Which quite possibly makes this a dumb puzzle that may have been solved a long time ago by Alan Adler.

Do tell me your Aeropress routine. What parameters do you use when brewing with it? How much coffee, what type of grind, how much water, how hot, how long to steep, etc etc etc. Do tell.

I was just thinking about the things people say and write about me. They may be true, but the people who say mean things about me don't know me and wouldn't know if they were true or not.

So my question is, how does "I'm not going to make that drink" equate to "You're an asshole"?

When someone asks me to do something I don't do, regardless of the reason, I'm not saying, "Your a piece of shit for asking me to do something like that." I'm saying, "I don't do that. That's something I don't do." But people get pissed jeans and say I'm an asshole.

I just don't understand how my refusal to do something... earns someone the right to throw comments out that demean my character.

I'm not saying I'm a good person. I'm certainly not a good person. But the people who know me best should be saying whether or not I'm an asshole. The people who have only had brushes with me should only comment about the episode they've encountered, good or bad.

Or if not putting the macchiato on my menu makes me an asshole, I guess I'm an asshole.

We have done this experiment in the past, in order to see what these deformed beans taste like, but we brewed them in a presspot. Isaiah decided to brew them with the espresso machine, which amplifies tastes and really can make slightly irritating tastes into an undrinkable mess. Which is what happened with the empties.

Two problems. First, we took empties from all the coffees we roasted and put them all together. He initially wanted to only use ones from our espresso coffees, but those coffees are super-clean and don't have many defects. So in order to get enough to pull shots, he had to use them all. So the blend, even if we had used clean, good coffee, probably wouldn't have tasted good in espresso. Random blend. Second, even though empties aren't a terrible lot, they tend to not add anything to the cup. And in an espresso, I can imagine they are pretty bad.

The first shots were ground too coarse (these defects are significantly less dense than regular coffee). The second shots pulled better, but tasted terrible. The third double, he made into an americano. I'm sure someone would've liked it. But that someone isn't me.

Another experiment we did recently combined beer and coffee. I took a can of Young's Double Chocolate Stout and heated it up to 200 degrees. I ground 28 grams of Costa Rica La Minita for a presspot. Poured the hot beer into the coffee and did my usual presspot routine. Also terrible. Though this time we shared it with one of our seemingly less discerning customers, and he loved it. So we gave him the whole thing. This afternoon I'm going to try pouring a bit of cold-brewed coffee into a cold Young's. Should be better. Hard to say.

We're working on finding all the things that DON'T work. That way it narrows down the things that might work. Plus, we'll do just about anything for a laugh.