The AeroPress!
If you are following my posts you may know that I received quite a special coffee brewing gear for my birthday. I didn’t write a review on it, because I wanted to experiement a bit with it and try different brewing techniques. You have several options with the AeroPress, but I will explain more about them a little bit later.
My version is a travelling one. It is a bit more compact and thus perfect for traveling and carrying around. All tou need for your brewing routine fits easily in this coffee cup, and you can brew your favorite drink directly into it.
An interesting little fact is that there is an AeroPress competition here in Bulgaria, and this is maybe the only coffee related contest in the country… Maybe we need a little bit more of a coffee culture and then we will see a broader variety…
Even the filters have a little holder to keep about 20-30 of them inside the cup, so no worries when travelling. Just make sure to have enough of them when you pack your baggage!
Putting two filters will boost the cleanliness of the final product, so it is a good idea to calculate them properly. And now what more do you need? Of course, some quality coffee beans… and we are ready!
The manual grinder works perfectly with the AeroPress, because it requires a bit coarser grinds. You can try going a step or two finer or a step or two coarser, but V60 filter grinding would work perfectly most of the time. If you want some more concentrated coffee, which you can thin a little bit with hot water, you can go a bit coarser and extract a minute or two more. This trick I learned from Misho, the Barista from the Specialty Place café. BTW he has scored third place on the AeroPress championship twice! And you can make a concentrated coffee because the carry on AeroPress is a bit smaller than the original one.
You can say that I forgot the mention the hot water jug… It’s good to have one, but it is not something necessary. Yup! That’s right… You can brew coffee in the arropress even with cold water. You need about five minutes of constant stirring, then extract directly over ice and there you have some cold brew coffee!
In today’s recipe I used 170 ml of hot water for 22 grams of coffee. When I’m done I will add about 170 ml water to achieve the V60 coffee/water ratio. And while the coffee is brewing it is time to find an appropriate container for the extraction. The good old jars are here to help!
Time to put the cap with the prewashed filters. We need to eliminate the uneanted paper flavors, so that is the way. When the cap is in place, I push out gently the air inside, until the coffee starts to appear in the holes. Then flip the AeroPress over the jar and wait.
At about 3:30 minutes it is time to push the “piston”. You don’t need a heavy push. Just enough to take out the liquid coffee extract. Coffee should be in the jar for relatively 30 seconds, which will mean about 4 minutes of brewing time.
This marks the end of the whole process. Coffee is ready, so it’s time to add the hot water. I want to divide the coffee by half. First one I will enjoy hot now, and the other one I will cool down and add some ice. This will be quite a refreshing coffee when traveling later in the day.
Cleaning of the AeroPress is extremely easy. You have just three pieces to wash and they don’t have any complicated shapes. It is ready to use again in just a minute, brewing either hot of cold coffee.
Oh, I forgot to mention… It costs about $40, which is extremely cheap method to brew delicious coffee!
That’s for today. Wish you a happy weekend!
Bye!