Aeropress: Inexpensive espresso alternative?

Today, I'll be talking about one of my favorite ways of making coffee, the Aeropress. This site has seen some great posts on coffee of late; I'd particularly encourage you to check out @ats-david who is doing some really cool work in the fair trade area. Here's a link to his latest post. But aside from a passing mention, I don't think anybody has gone into detail about Aeropress coffee.

On to the Aeropress! In 2012, I was researching espresso machines, and I came across all these forums where someone would come along and ask "what's the best espresso machine for $100?" And everybody would say "There's no such thing as a good espresso setup (grinder+machine) for less than $1000! Instead, buy an Aeropress for $25, spend the rest of your budget on a grinder, and you'll have the best-value coffee that money can buy." So that's what I did. This is an Aeropress:

It's a plastic cylinder, a little plastic screen, and a plunger. That's it. You put a little paper filter (they cost about a penny apiece, I think) into the filter holder, like so:

Screw the filter holder onto the bottom of the press cylinder:

Place the whole thing onto a cup:

Grind up some coffee beans. I use a medium-fine grind, but the press is very forgiving to various grinds. I like my coffee ludicrously strong (my guests are usually offended at how strong my coffee is), so I put 3 scoops of coffee into my grinder. Anyway, here's a scoop of beans:

And here's what 3 scoops of ground coffee look like in the press:

Then, pour in water. The instructions say to use water at 170 degrees F (75 C), but I usually just use water straight off the boil because that's easier. There are a bunch of ways to do the water step; what I typically do is this. I add the water:

Then I stir to wet all the grounds:

Then I let it sit for about 2 minutes. In this time, much of the water drains out. After the 2 minutes, I fill the whole thing back up with water, and then stick the plunger in the top:

With the plunger there, the water won't drain out; so I can leave it like this for a while. At this point, I'm almost 100% sure over-steeping the coffee; but I've found that for whatever reason, the final cup almost never suffers too badly for this. If you get one of these yourself, definitely work on fine-tuning your method to what you like. Anyway, I leave it there for a little bit, then I press the plunger down slowly until there's just a little gap of air between the plunger and the top of the coffee grounds:

Next, I take off the filter holder screen. See, there's the wet filter stuck to the coffee grounds:

Getting the grounds out of the press is the easiest thing in the world! You just push the plunger all the way down, and the grounds pop out the end. I like to compost mine! Here's the end of the press right after I pushed the grounds out:

Then I rinse off the press, and I'm pretty much done! What I have now is extremely strong black coffee, which you'll find is slightly reminiscent of straight espresso without all the beautiful crema:

I like to add a bit of whole milk, top the mug up with hot water, and enjoy!

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, I'd encourage you to check out my brother's post on gardening. He has some really interesting urban agriculture projects going, and he's well worth your time.