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Aerobie AeroPress

saltandfat:

While not a coffee drinker myself, I’m married to a caffeine junkie - one whose wish list this past holiday season included an espresso maker. So researching I went, and I’m back from weeks of pained review-scoping to tell you that the general consensus is such: if you’re looking to spend less than, oh, $1,500, espresso makers are sort of a lost cause.

Every model seems to get the same complaints: inconsistent brewing, weird controls, wonky housing that’s hard to clean, unreliable hardware that fails in a matter of months. Even when I considered that for pretty much ever household item and electronic gadget there’s a loud minority who have had a bad experience, this was still worrying - what’s the workhorse of affordable, casual espresso makers?

The answer is a bit surprising - it may be this odd-looking little thing called an AeroPress. A hybrid design between a drip brewer and a French press, it’s a small, $30 set consisting of a chamber, cap, and plunger, which you position over your cup and then apply gentle pressure to press your coffee through a filter. It takes up no counter space, requires no electricity, has no moving parts, and is as easy to clean as a measuring cup. Sure, you have to buy filters; a year’s supply will set you back a laughable $6.

But how’s the coffee, you ask? Once again, I’m not the world’s biggest coffee drinker, but the AeroPress, combined with a frother, makes the best homemade latte I’ve had. My wife loves it, as do several friends who have them. It’s also recommended by Cooks Illustrated. At $30, you don’t have much to lose, really. I hope you find you’ve found a winner, though!

I drink a lot of coffee - an unhealthy amount, no doubt - and I have to agree on the opening comments about espresso makers. I was given a Cuisinart model as a gift, and my in-laws, who bought it for me, no doubt paid in excess of $300 for it (I am fully aware that that’s cheap for the kind of machine we’re discussing, here).

Within 6 months, its time-to-pour had gone from less than a minute to over two; almost a year to the day I received it, it died. Cuisinart wanted me to pay to ship it across Canada for repair, so it ended up at the recycling plant, and I went back to my Moka. I’ve had it for 15 years, I paid maybe 20 bucks for it, and it’s served me faithfully with nothing more than a daily rinse: water, coffee, stovetop, done.