cpreston wrote:I have had the same experience- that for some reason I prefer at least 20% more bean weight when using an aeropress. I don't know why. The resulting coffee is very good, both for dark and medium light roasts.

I have found that the factory instructions are very hard to beat, other than my preferring the inverted method. I use 170F for dark roasts and 185F for medium-light (tested a wide range of temperatures, each time readjusting the grind to suit).

In my experience the Aeropress is fairly forgiving in terms of making drinkable cups, but quite fussy if you want the best from it. I found I needed very tight consistentcy in temperature, pour method and agitation.

If you have access to a Prismo, give Michael's recipe a shot!

K7 wrote:If you look at the recent Aeropress competition winners here, just about everyone is dosing 30g or higher (for single serving, I presume).

The WBC winners are grinding coarse with #1 and #3 adding water after extraction. Obviously there are only 5 variables (water temp, time, grind, coffee amount, and filtration) but these result in many, many possible outcomes. While the dose size is seemingly consistent the other variables can easily be game changers. Plus the finals judges have pretty refined palates who should be able to detect things less refined palates like mine can't.

Also, they report their methods but not the coffee's used. I know that a competition coffee is chosen for a specific reason and shouldn't really be compared to a "regular" coffee. Don't read too much into that but be aware that there are differences. Some folk regularly drink what would be a competition coffee but that's probably a small group relatively speaking.

My working title was "f*%# brew guides", but the requisite footage died on the cutting room floor

The theme likely will resurface

My complaint goes well beyond the WAC fluff

Love the working title and totally agree with you. Such nonsense!!!!

cccpu wrote:Enter this recipe by coffeemmichael...
video

I may be mistaken but I think Aeropress winners are picked from blind tasting so all these theatrics may be somewhat arbitrary but I still get it in competition however things like lowering water temp or increasing dose are going to be variables you can use to stand out in the cup. I would like to see someone win with the exact recipe that comes with every Aeropress just to prove the point that we don't need to reinvent the wheel every 6 months.

I agree with Fabian (from the video you posted) about keep coffee simple but broadly I find his remarks about the clover at the beginning to be counter to his point. the clover may be simple enough to use but it's a very high price machine far out of the reach of most consumers and I personally think that price tag puts coffee back into this subservient level Fabian is trying to avoid mystifying the process of making coffee with a $10,000 price tag. But kudos to him for bringing a version of it to the Aeropress (which may have been his greater point to begin with).

Yesterday I did a "no press" Aeropress. I just let it percolate through the tube with the stock filters but I didn't use the plunger. It was slower than I expected, I only stirred the bloom (I did a bloom because this was no longer an immersion but a pourover) otherwise no agitation and the coffee bed was eerily flat like as if I pressed something into it to make it that flat and nothing stuck to the walls (also eerily). I probably didn't need to bloom the coffee because the drawdown was really slow so it still had immersion characteristics that would allow full saturation through immersion. I also sieved the grinds at 400-800 microns (which might be why the bed was so flat). The resulting cup was quite strong (it was a 7min brew time) but after bypass it was very enjoyable and no sediment, next time (in about 5 min) I'll try a coarser grind to get the brew time lower.