Aeropress; Professional use

Brewing on the Aeropress 4-cup

I have previos made a blog post regarding the use of the Aeropress, but my inspiration came from a local coffee bar, where Aeropress brewed coffee was on the menu. The brewing process at the local coffee bar, was different from what the included Aeropress manual stated, so I thought it could be beneficial for the readers of Coffee Channel to get knowledge about the two different brew methods. If you haven´t seen the previous blog post regarding the Aeropress, click on this link.

Moistening the Aeropress plunger

Its highly important that you moister the Aeropress plunger, cause when adding pressure onto the plunger, the fluid will break through the sealing of the plunger if its dry. (Its the rubber tip of the plunger that needs water applied) The picture above shows that I'm pouring hot water onto the plunger, but it does not really matter cause the mainly purpose is to moisture the plunger. If you are a hardcore coffee addict/nerd you should definitely use hot water, because the plunger will be preheating and therefore not cause a cooling off the hot water to be added.

Insert plunger into the chamber

 Place the plunger on a countertop nor a table like I and apply the chamber on top. This is actually the opposite of the "normal" brewing method and by normal I mean the included guide lines from Aeropress.

Applying hot water into the chamber

In the previous step the chamber along with plunger created a bowl for brewing, which could be preheated like shown in the picture above. The reason why you want to preheat the Aeropress is because of its cooling affect on the merging between ground coffee and hot water, which will lead towards a more sour cup. This scenario is of cause if you use "temperate" water, set to about 80 degrees, which therefore can't afford to loose more heat. If you on the other hand use boiling hot water, you don't need to preheat the chamber, cause the cooling affect will have a positive effect on the applied water temperature. If you go with the preheating of the chamber, keep the water in the chamber for about two minutes to achieve the optimal chamber temperature. In this spare time you can grind your coffee and moisture your filter.

Moistering the filter

In the last couple of days I have tried to run some test regarding the use of a dry versus a wet filter. The result of these few tryouts were clearly that the moistened filter holds a greater resistance when applying pressure onto the chamber.

Applying ground coffee into the chamber

Empty the water used for preheating the chamber and apply your ground coffee. Use the same measurements like the previous guide; one scoop per cup merged with one cup mark water.

Apply hot water onto the ground coffee

The chamber is filled with ground coffee and applying water is the next step. Apply the amount of water that suits your gr. of ground coffee to achieve the right balance in the cup.

Stirring into the fusion of ground coffee and hot water

 When the right amount of water have been applied, take your included stirrer and stir into the fusion of ground coffee and hot water to release CO2 gases trapped in the layers of coffee on top of the water. This will lead to a much better extraction, because the water will be in closer contact with the ground coffee.

Applying the moistened filter

When the fusion of ground coffee and hot water have merged in 30 seconds to one minute, apply the moistened filter. This should be applied like shown in the picture above, do not try to flip the Aeropress to seal the filter.

Flipping the Aeropress onto the cup

The last step is to flip the Aeropress onto the cup. Its important to keep your hans on both the chamber and the plunger, because the flipping will cause a little vacuum inside the chamber. This vacuum is noting serious, but the plunger will go up a couple of millimeters. Lastly apply pressure to extract the brewed Aeropress coffee into the cup. This extracting should take about 30 seconds from the start of applying pressure to the final extracted coffee.

Close up at the final result

Here you go, a beautiful brewed cup of coffee. This coffee have been brewed like professionals and its surely revealed in the final cup. I must say I'm mostly fund of this particular brewing method, because its more simple, quicker and better tasting.

// Hendrup

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