god I’m so close to pulling the trigger on that refurb forte. If I hadn’t just blown a shitton of money replacing all the fucking siding on my house and buying my dumb kid a fucking ridiculously overpriced 7 year old honda civic and I forgot I had some options from the company that laid me off that were about to expire so I had to exercise those and take a tax hit, I would have snap bought it. Sigh. If nothing else blows up this week I’ll probably just do it.
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update: damn good, slightly more work
my grinder sucks though, any suggests on that? And how fine am I supposed to grind beans with the aero press?
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This is the thing I worry about by not swirling it violently Hoffman-style. However, what I find is that the top layer after the bloom is visually misleading. As you noted, what you’re showing there isn’t the shape of the final bed. It has basically foamed up / mushroomed and is neither dense nor strongly supported underneath, and the first water to hit after the bloom breaks it and knocks it down, filling in those holes.
So I start my first pour by gently knocking that upper crust down into those gaps / channels with the first ~50-100 mL or so. After that, I get the water level up and do a gentle swirl to capture high-and-dry grounds and level it out. Too much agitation is immediately obvious to me by the sound of flow rate exiting the cone during the first pour, and I could tell you with almost perfect accuracy which side of 3:30 my brew will finish on. Lately it’s under 3:00 including a 0:45 bloom (single continuous pour) and it’s the best coffee I’ve been making with sweeter, juicier acidity (apple, blueberry) as opposed to the tart / sour (lemon, lime). The problem with agitation is that my brews might finish at 3:45 or 4:00 or 5:00 or never due to unpredictable degrees of clogging.
How much do you want to spend? The grinder is the most important piece of gear but it also depends on what your goals are. If your end game is medium to dark roast press coffee, it won’t matter quite as much. If you want to isolate the jasmine and candied apricot from a Panama gesha (which is mostly the type of thing we’ve been talking about in here recently), then it matters a ton.
AP recommends grinding on the finer side (think preground coffee or finer), but they also suggest brewing with 175 to 185 F water which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe someone in here who has solved AP has a good answer for this. It probably depends on the flavor profile you’re going for though: are you going for “dark” nutty/chocolaty coffee or do you want the “bright” crazy stuff?
this is definitely my goal.
I like dark coffee way more than the bright crazy stuff.
I knew a thing!
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yeah I kinda want to cut into the bed at this point just to see what it looks like. maybe I’ll do that on the next pour, I don’t think this would affect the final taste too much.
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aeropresses are rad and the gateway toy for many coffee fiend fellow travelers. And also having the kind of four-figure grinder that LMM and pvn are talking about isn’t as crucial with an aeropress (which can be more forgiving than say v60s) (though not tons more). LMM will have better recs in the $100-200 range than I will (which is going to get you a sweet grinder for aeropress imo), but researching Baratza wouldn’t be a bad place to start, in part because there’s a huge culture of folks sharing their aeropress recipes and they often use the Baratza grinder settings as a benchmark.
PVN and others know more about aeropress than I do but my advice is first spend six weeks playing around and just getting super comfy with regular & inverted and dialing in a few different bags of beans. Then when that’s over start googling the various World Aeropress Champion methods (they list their procedures to the gram and the second iirc) and also reddit and then go from there
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imo one of the remarkable and laugh out loud parts about devoting a ton of concentration and energy towards improving at pretty much anything is always being surprised by how precise and good human beings can get. If the Olympics added an event for pouring hot water and hitting an exact number of grams without looking, then I’ll bet half the people reading this thread think that they’d have a shot at podiuming—I know I do. But Dunning-Kruger is always lurking too, it’s like, I grew up in the woods and that’s where I’m most comfortable, but when once upon a time a gf’s fam invited me to costa rica for a week of hiking/birding I sort of thought to myself sweet, I’m going to low-key impress them with how at one with the woods I am—and oh what a joke that turned out to be. It turned out they are among the very best birders in costa rica which is no small thing, and our first long walk they identified ~190 discrete species of birds, half by call alone. No parents were impressed that day and I might as well have been on that walk blindfolded on rollerskates.
I mean is it true that a freakshow roulette croupier can hit a number? To me that seems impossible, like seriously beyond belief, but then here we go again, because wherever skill is involved then the most elite people in the world will astonish you every time. To the point where if there is some roulette pinwheel god out there who can hit a number 10x more than chance suggests, I could maybe believe it
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lastly since I can tell my time with the Smart Grinder is coming to an end (THANKS JERKS) then for posterity and in case anybody out there owns the two breville gadgets below and never feels like they got their espresso game grooved:
—with Gamut beans (from Chromatic)
—using the Breville BES840XL Infuser (which is never ever going to make A+ espresso but it’s not bad)
—15.64g beans in
—grind at #12 on a Breville Smart Grinder (with top burr set at 6 i.e. the factory setting)
—water at 204F (you have to reprogram the Infuser; google and you’ll figure it out)
—hold down the double button for 10 seconds of pre
—then release and let it extract for 28-33 more seconds of brewing
—should yield 44-48g of espresso, which will fill roughly 2 fl oz of volume (because of crema/fluffiness)
and yes the underpowered one-hole wand can be intimidated to the point of making decently microfoamed milk and decently acceptable latte art. I can make a flower even if a third of them still look like dicks
If you want it more ristretto then 17.72g in, 35g espresso out. For reg shots if your upper burr = 9 then 17.11g in, grind@#5 and tamp with like 40lbs of pressure (it helps to have a tamper that only engages when you apply 30 pounds of tamping force, espro makes good ones) then cross your fingers that you’ll get ~50g espresso out on the above time schedule. All these procedures will pull shots that are pretty balanced and in a different class than pod stuff, but if you want top-notch espresso then you’re gonna have to spend an order of magnitude more money (at least), and regardless after all the above I’m still only choosing espresso over coffee/tea maybe once every two weeks
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aeropress is very forgiving and basically you have to try really hard to make a bad cup. Honestly I don’t find that much difference in the various methods out there. Varying grind size is really the only variable you need to worry about IMO, though you may want to use cooler water with darker roasts (I think I’ve gone as low as 160F though generally I’ll use 185-190F with medium/dark roasts and boiling with very light roasts.
The downside to aeropress is that the while your worst cups will be pretty good, the best cups will be about the same. You won’t get those really mindblowing cups. But yeah, it’s a great gateway.
A good conical burr grinder is really all you need then. By far the most recommended electric grinder under $150 is the Baratza Encore ($139 new / $99 refurb). I’m not going to claim it’s the best since that seems subjective, but it’s the one I’m familiar with having owned it for 5-6 years. It’s moddable and user serviceable which the company promotes (it’s unclear if this will change since being purchased by Breville).
If you’re willing to grind by hand, you can arguably get better grind quality from a high-end manual grinder for about the same price. The 1zpresso JX ($129) is usually recommended for best overall value:
The Comandante C40 ($250) is considered the absolute best conical hand grinder for non-espresso and is often used in competitions. It’s hard to find them in stock though, and it looks like the latest batch might get a price increase to $300. You can get a used Vario for $300 so tougher to recommend at that price.
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Forget everything I said about AP grind size. I started looking at these AP wOrLd ChAmPiOnS and 95% of them are grinding extremely coarse, like even coarser than French press in some cases, so I have to imagine that’s a better starting point.
They are probably all using light roasts but I’d look for a good medium / medium+ in your case if you aren’t trying for blueberry acid bombs. Anything darker loses unique origin characteristics and is basically brewing charcoal.
Sometimes there are even lighter roasts that fit the profile you’re looking for–the key is reading the description for tasting notes: the more fruits you see, the more acidic it is. Here’s an example of a coffee I’d pick for you to try:
In my experience, the first note is the one I’m most likely to find, so seeing cocoa instead of a fruit here tells me this isn’t a crazy acidic coffee that tastes like Blueberry Kool-Aid. In fact, there are no fruits listed in the tasting notes at all. Roast level is “medium” which is imprecise but also indicates this isn’t a bright coffee.
Now that doesn’t sound too exciting to me and is more along the lines of what I’d serve my parents at a Sunday breakfast. This one sounds more to my taste:
Cotton candy by itself has me reaching for the credit card. That appearing alongside floral and peach means there’s something really bizarre happening with the sugars / acids in this bean that I want to know about. The roast is as light as this roaster goes which means the acidity potential is very high. Taken from the detailed description:
This Yirgacheffe comes from the ADADO tribe of 7000 farmers. Washed Yirgacheffe coffee tends to have thin body, floral aroma, a powerful lemon drop candy taste, a lot of sweetness, and be somewhat confusing to the poor unassuming person you give a mug of it to whether they are drinking coffee or tea. What stands this lot apart is the stone fruit taste. In addition to the jasmine aroma, lemon candy, and sweetness, is the presence of apricot and peach.
Perfect.
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I admire the effort of a cafe here to price coffee like a Veblen good.
When I saw that a cup of espresso was 50 leva (about $30), I assumed the listing forgot a decimal place. Was worth a higher price at 5 lev imo.
I like a good cup of coffee but I’d rather take a smaller drop in quality and save 48 leva by going to a meh place
I suppose they make more money by selling one cup a day at 50 leva than having tons of customers and barely breaking even on each cup
this might be the best video of all time
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"I should get a blender…
Aw yeah, look at my crema"
LMAO!
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aeropress is fucking awesome.
been trying more lighter blends with more flavors that I previously didn’t like because it was acidic and fucking loving it. @Lawnmower_Man your advice is sooooo appreciated.
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I dig a few of the aesthetic points of this machine but it’s super tilting to me that there are still few (affordable) single dose brewing autos for specialty coffee that do everything right and relatively more of these pod systems where the goal is to lock you into their brand / system.
It’s a bottomless pit from here.
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I think the video is just extremely funny for many reasons, some are probably unintentional.
He didn’t really make a good point against the machine (other than the obvious lock you into their brand). It seems pretty smart and making aerated foam on top is pretty ingenious for the intended crowd.
tbh i didn’t know there are specialty pod for nespresso until this video. I will try one out (i doubt anyone here uses pods, but if you know of a good one do tell)
I watched one of the Nespresso videos and it looks like they are actually calling it a proper crema (oils and fats attached to CO2 bubbles), so the real payload here by Hoffman is supposed to be when he says this isn’t a crema at all and just a cheap aeration trick. I assumed this machine was going to be expensive, but $200 just isn’t that much if there are quality pods available and if they make reasonably good coffee, which I assume must be true. That’s pretty convenient for most people.