Greetings all,
I recently re-started my home roasting process back up again, and had a question about a brew method I've been interested in trying. First, the reason I am asking is because the Zassenhaus crank grinder I recently acquired seems to only pull an even grind on medium fine to fine grind settings. I don't hate it but it's not as consistent as I'd like. I began to think about aeropress immersion brewing and thought I could essentially pull a similar extraction in my french press--following extraction time guidelines for the aeropress/grind one is brewing. All this while realizing the french press would not be filtering out much if any of the grounds, but would be more for brewing and pouring.

So I went ahead and gave it a shot and brewed, setting a timer for 1 minute. After the timer, I poured the brew into a cone filter in one of my pour-over cones. The coffee filtered rather quickly, leaving behind all visible fines and creating a fairly clear, bright cup. It did turn out just a tad under extracted and had a very faint sourness to it, but I also didn't end up grinding my coffee as finely as I originally planned, so perhaps I should have left it another 30 seconds or so...

I realize I could just get an aeropress (and that this essentially adds a step) or similar fine-ground-capable brewer, but I am wondering what everyone's thought are on this method? Has anyone else used a similar technique? Thoughts and advice welcome! I think the main reason this could be "better" than aeropress is the obvious fact you can fit much more coffee/water in at a time to brew. That combined with the much quicker extraction that comes from finer grinds could make the relatively quick extra step worthwhile in my opinion (and also keep me from buying more coffee equipment for the time being )

I recently had traditional Ethiopian coffee at a cafe prepared in a jebena. It's an extremely finely ground coffee, immersion brewed. With an adequate waiting time, there was no sludge in the cups.

I have brewed jebenas at home and filtered the output with a v60 or Bonavita dripper.

Brewing immersions with only 1 minute seems very short. Immersion brewing is different from pourover because you can saturate the water you use (whereas pourover keeps adding fresh water that keeps extracting)

The Aeropress, like the siphon, gets away with a shortened contact time by using agitation to speed up extraction.

happycat wrote:I recently had traditional Ethiopian coffee at a cafe prepared in a jebena. It's an extremely finely ground coffee, immersion brewed. With an adequate waiting time, there was no sludge in the cups.

I have brewed jebenas at home and filtered the output with a v60 or Bonavita dripper.

Brewing immersions with only 1 minute seems very short. Immersion brewing is different from pourover because you can saturate the water you use (whereas pourover keeps adding fresh water that keeps extracting)

How interesting! I had to google what a jebena was. I suppose I was worried about the temp of the coffee cooling too quickly(especially in my glass press), so that's why I kept it a bit shorter the first run.

I tried again, this time following the same steps but stirring some after pouring to help with the extraction, and then let it settle some before filtering in my pour-over cone(about 4 minutes total contact). This mostly works--the result was much more balanced-- but I could only get 14 oz or so before it was clogged with fines, and about 6 oz wasted.

So I'll probably stick to single cups with this method until I get an aeropress/moka pot to expand my collection! Thanks for the input!

Cheers