I love the aeropress! In terms of Bang for Buck, this is it. It’s easy to use, versatile and you can take it anywhere. It’s kind of like a fancy french press. It uses a paper (or metal) filter to give you a more refined and cleaner cup. And it uses air pressure to help extract more coffee oils. You can use it to make filter coffee, long blacks (with or without milk), espresso style shots and even Cold Brew.
Because of its versatility, there are 100’s of recipes for making coffee with the Aeropress. It can be quite overwhelming. But it shows that there’s a lot of room to play around with your recipe until you nail your preference. Essentially, it’s hard to make a bad coffee.
I’m going to give you my method and recipe which I think is easily adaptable and a good foundation. This method is the ‘upside down’ method and will produce a Long Black which you can either drink straight or add milk to depending on what coffee you use to brew.
You will need:
Aeropress
16g Medium Ground Coffee (think Table Salt)
92C Water (leave water off the boil for 2 mins)
Timer
Aeropress Paddle or Spoon
Cup
Method:
- Take your Aeropress chamber and plunger and connect them until the rubber seal is at the number 4. Turn the Aeropress upside down so that it’s like a wine glass with the chamber at the top.
- Preheat the brewer, your cup and wet the paper Filter in the Filter basket.
- Add your coffee to the chamber.
- Start your timer and pour water up to the number 1. Give the coffee a thorough stir to ensure all the grounds are saturated. Screw the Filter basket with paper Filter on the top and leave it.
- Once the timer hits 1:00, carefully flip the Aeropress over into your cup and begin slowly pressing down. You’re aiming to finish pressing around the 2 minutes total brew time so take your time.
- Once you’ve finished pressing, add some more hot water to top up your brew. Drink straight or add milk and enjoy!
- Clean your Aeropress by simply removing the basket, popping out the coffee and giving it all a rinse. You can even give the Paper Filters a rinse and reuse them another time.
Once you’ve tried it, feel free to play around and tweak this recipe to suit your taste.
Some suggestions for tweaking (Change one thing at a time!):
Change the Grind size – Because Aeropress is versatile, it can handle a broad range of Grind Size so feel free to go finer if you want more extraction or courser if you want to ease it up a little.
Change the amount of Coffee
Change the amount of Water
Change the Water Temperature – I’ve made some delicious coffees with water as low as 80 Degrees. Experiment and have fun!