Welcome to the series finale, episode five
of our AeroPress series.
And I couldn't let it end without answering all
of your questions.
So that's what we're gonna do today.
You had a bunch, as an audience,
of very consistent questions.
Lots of you asked the same thing
in comments, on Instagram, on the subreddit,
And so I'm gonna answer
the main questions that you asked.
Now, the first question we gonna answer is
actually kind of a surprising one to me.
A lot of you asked this,
you asked can I reuse my paper filters?
Is it okay?
Does it make much of a difference to taste?
And this surprises me for a couple of reasons.
One it's the only brewer I've ever heard
of people wanting to reuse paper for.
Now I know Alan, inventor
of the AeroPress is pro doing this.
He says you can use them up to 10 to 12 times.
I don't know about that.
I'm gonna do a simple test.
Side-by-side a brand new filter
versus one I've brewed with a couple of times.
Can I taste the difference?
Is it there?
Then if it is, or isn't
that's kind of interesting.
Why you want to reuse
your paper is also kind of interesting.
I would say if it's saving money, bear in mind,
you know goes
from being two pens down to one.
They're very cheap to start with.
I would say if you're trying to save the environment
be cautious of how you're rinsing
your paper using also hot fresh water to do that.
That has an energy cost
as much as 0.17 grams of paper does.
That side.
Let's do the taste test.
So in this brewer, it's gonna be a plain brand new paper.
And then this brewer, this one.
Now you can see it's a little discolored from being used.
You can see that there are
some fines sort of on the paper.
It'd be interesting to see
how tastable this is.
In a blind test, same dose, same recipe
and both will be using the technique that I recommend
as the base technique from the ultimate technique video.
If you haven't watched that, go
and watch that.
Then come back.
And this is kind of interesting
this is I'm pressing now
it's actually a bit harder
to press through the used filter.
It might be because it's a bit more clogged
from previous usage, from the fines from other brews
but a bit more work.
I'll duck out so I don't know which is which
and we'll taste.
So can I find, can I spot the bowl
the way I'm approach this is very simple.
I can look for one that has a little bit more bitterness.
That would be the clue to me.
That would be what I'd expect from a reused filter
but I might be wrong.
I don't think it's this bowl.
Don't think it's this bowl.
If I had to guess, and it's not huge.
And there's a bit of variation here, but
if I had to guess, I would say,
it's this bowl here is the reused paper.
No.
Heart, this bowl.
It's a surprise for me.
I don't understand why I felt like
this bowl tasted different to this one
but that's the nature of trying and tasting.
They're exactly the same liquid, right?
Like that's how flawed
the human tasting experience is.
Honestly, this bowl
it's not very pronounced any of flavors.
Now, important caveat here.
This filter has been used three today.
I don't know how it would fair
if I left it a day or two between uses
where there would have been more opportunity
for oxidizing it.
But I would say
if you want to use a paper again immediately,
certainly for one or two brews afterwards,
I think you're fine.
That's a surprise for me.
I thought it would be much clearer.
It wasn't, let's move on to the next question.
Now, quite a lot of you asked the question
which coffee is best suited
to the AeroPress?
Or how do I get the most
out of floral coffees with the Aeropress?
So, you know does it work better
with some coffees than others?
Can I use espresso roast in it?
All of these kinds of questions
to me bundled up in one.
And here's my approach and my thoughts.
The AeroPress is a brewer and it's just a sort
of platform for getting flavor of coffee.
It has a great deal
of potential to mess with your variables
which means I think you can adapt it around
almost any coffee that's part of its charm.
I don't think some coffees work better
than others in an AeroPress.
I think some coffees are easier to brew than others.
I think that's true.
But I don't think the AeroPress
necessarily suits one kind of brew.
I would be looking to adapt my technique to sort
of get the most out of a coffee, right?
If it's a coffee where what I love
about it is texture driven.
Then I wouldn't be afraid
to use a slightly higher dose,
no longer steep time to get
at the kind of fullest experience out of it.
If it's a more floral coffee
that I might want to make sure
I'm using the highest possible temperatures
and you know, and make sure I'm grinding fine enough
to get everything out of that,
but actually dropping my dose a little bit
to have a little bit more sort
of room for clarity of flavor,
especially florals but that's not about the AeroPress.
It doesn't suit one coffee over another.
I think it's appeal is it's incredibly flexible.
The next question is kind of a two questions in one
or at least two different questions with one answer.
So a lot of you wanted to know
how would I approach bypass brewing, right?
If I want to use the AeroPress
for brewing for two, if I want to try
and get two cups out of this
what would my recommendations be?
And a lot of you asked, what's my recommendations
for iced coffee from an AeroPress.
Then it turns out the answer is basically the same.
So in both of these brewers
I'm gonna double up my ground coffee dose.
So 22 grams goes into each one of these
and I'm gonna be steeping a bit longer
because I've got more coffee to extract it's ground
where I would usually grind it.
I could've gone a little finer.
I'm happy just to extend time here.
So I'm gonna steep for probably four minutes on both
of these to get a good extraction of this higher dose.
I'm gonna use as much water, hot water
in the brewers as I can.
Now I know from testing their were 22 grams
in with bloom all that kind of stuff,
I can get about 240 grams of water
in before it starts to get a little bit sketchy.
Obviously a lot of that's fun,
but still I don't want to go much higher than that.
So in both cases with 22 grams of coffee and 240 grams
of hot water, I'm missing about 160 grams.
That's how much ice I have in this one here.
That'll do a lot of the melting and cooling as we brew.
And here I'll add 160 grams of hot water to sort
of bring it back to a more normal concentration.
We'll brew them and we'll taste them and talk about them.
We want to melt as much of the ice as possible.
That will bring us back to a normal state
but worst case scenario, it doesn't all melt.
As long as it's cold.
That's good.
I'll put it into a nice chilled glass with some ice.
There'll be a little bit more dilution over time as well.
That'll bring us back to that kind of normal strength.
It is a very pleasant brew actually.
In my experience,
you don't kind of get the same clarity of flavor.
You get a sweet cup, a balanced cup,
a full bodied kind of rich, brew this way,
but there's something about it
I feel that you just miss out inevitably
on just like a little bit of extraction,
that means that this is by no means disappointing,
but in an A/B test, wouldn't just
be missing a little bit of something.
But broadly speaking use as much water as you can
in your AeroPress and get as much extraction
as you can done there before you dilute down later
this isn't the only time we're gonna talk
about this style of brewing though.
So we'll come back to them a bit.
The ice brew very tasty, great for summer.
You know that texture is there.
It's nice and rich and full and a pleasing.
It's hot day outside.
This is a great way to drink a coffee.
It's a great way to produce enough coffee
for a couple of people to sit together
in the sun and have a nice time, recommended.
Now with the iced coffee in particular
you can scale this down.
If you want to make just one iced coffee for you
you could use 11 grams, half the amount
of water you usually would.
And then the requisite amount of ice in there.
It's really the same as the ice pour of a method.
If you haven't seen it, it's up here.
If you want to watch it.
But now we're gonna go back
to the topic of paper filters again
and ask the question is two papers
that much better than just one?
A lot of you asked this question
should you be using two papers?
Do you get a better result?
A cleaner brew?
I would expect you would similar
to the ASA papers that we tested
in the previous video
of these, two papers would be thicker than one.
AeroPress papers are very thin.
They're led a lot through compared
to something like the V 60 paper.
So this makes sense.
The question is, is the difference big enough
that I can taste it blind?
That's always the test.
So again, another triangle will come from this.
So on this side, we'll brew the one paper on this side
we'll brew the double paper, neither are rinsed.
And maybe that'll help me move that
I don't think doubling the amount
of paper is consequential, to be honest, but we'll see.
Let's go.
In terms of one being cloudier,
one being clearer, with a gentle press on both.
I don't think it's particularly apparent
but will it manifest in the taste?
That's the question.
So I will, again, step
out the way, will set me
up a little blind triangle test.
We'll see what happens.
This is where you start
to play games with your own head.
Am I looking for a single bowl of a double filtered
or a single bowl of a single filtered coffee here?
I don't know which is which way round
we're looking necessarily.
And so, yeah, I have this double option in my head
which is if it's just one bowl
of a single filter, then I think it's this one.
If it's one bowl of a double filter
then I think it's this one.
I'm gonna go with this bowl here
which feels just a little bit cleaner than the others.
I will say if I'm right, if this out to be correct
I'm still not sure it's worth using two papers.
If you're, if you're pressing gently.
A harder press would have a bigger impact
unquestionably, but for a gentle press is
I prefer to use it.
I'm not sure I need to, but let's see.
That is not an odd one out.
Indeed this.
This bowl in the middle.
No.I can't taste it.
I can't taste it.
I'll go back now that I know
that it's the different bowl,
they taste the same.
They taste the same.
They really do taste the same.
I'm just not sure
I could recommend using two papers
when one does a pretty good job.
I'm not sure you get that much
of an improvement in terms of cleanliness.
In fact, I can't taste the difference.
I could with the ASA papers,
which is kind of interesting.
But with these ones, I can't really, maybe
if you're pressing really hard, it might make a difference.
But ultimately I would say, don't worry too much.
If you're pressing gently one paper is fine.
Let's clean up to a couple of quick questions.
So one question, a lot
of people asked was about metal filters.
They said do I need to grind differently
to use metal filter?
And I would say, no.
if you're using the technique that I recommend
or even if you're using an inverted method, no,
essentially the extractions really, really being done
by the infusion stage a little bit is being done
in the percolation, but that's about a column of water
evenly passing through a bed of coffee.
It might be a bit easier to press, you know
with a metal filter.
And I would not give into temptation to press hard
that will make for a silty, a gritty, a cup.
But no, I don't think you do need to grind differently
for a metal filter.
And then the next question,
that's a nice, quick easy question is
what about scaling the recipe?
I did 11 gram to 200.
What if I want to drink more coffee, right?
We've seen that the AeroPress can accommodate more liquid.
So yes, if you want to scale it up
to 1450 grams to say 250 to 270 mils
of water, go for it.
Absolutely should be the same in terms
of steep, agitation, press time, all of that kind of stuff.
It might take you a little bit longer to press
but I wouldn't worry about that too much.
Now, a lot of you had questions about these.
These are the AeroPress dice
that we made a few years ago now actually,
and you asked, are they ever coming back?
And the answer is no,
but there's good news.
The original set like this, no
we're never gonna make them again.
But we did work with the world AeroPress championship
for them to make their own custom sets.
So those are still available.
If you're not familiar with them.
The idea is very simple on each
of the dice is a different variable
of AeroPress brewing.
So when you roll them,
it produces a recipe for you.
You can roll a little bit over 7,000 different recipes
which is kind of ridiculous
but that's kind of the joy of the AeroPress.
So you'd end up with like, you know
your desired brew, temperature,
your dose of coffee in water,
your method, be it inverted or standard,
your grind size and steep time,
and some steering techniques.
And to put that together, you've got a brew.
So they're really fun,
but we're never gonna make them again,
but there are a different set available.
I'll leave a link down
the description below
for those of you who are still curious.
Now there is one very big question left to answer.
Why is my technique so different
from the AeroPress championship style techniques?
Those are often very different in terms of dose,
all of that kind of stuff to what I'm doing.
So why?
Why am I so far away from that?
Are those better, worse?
What do I think?
We'll touch on that after a couple of things.
firstly, this video has a sponsor
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So here's our last side by side brew of the series.
Now I'll be brewing my technique.
11 grams of coffee, 200 grams of water over here.
We've got 30 grams of coffee, a lot more coffee.
This will go in with less water
only 100 grams of water.
We'll steep for 40, 45 seconds.
We'll probably do it inverted.
That's very common.
We'll flip, we'll press quite gently.
And then we'll dilute that liquid
down with maybe 100 grams of water afterwards.
I don't want to pick one person
and feel like I'm singling them out.
This style of brewing is very common of this kind
of high dose, less liquid in the brewer dilution afterwards.
So let's get these going
and then we can have a little taste,
Competition brew in a, my star brew.
Now obviously with a very large dose of coffee anything
from that coffee that's easily dissolved.
There'll be a lot of that in there.
So you'll have a high concentration of certain things.
It is highly aromatic as a kind of cup goes.
This does not smell as intense,
but again, that's not particularly surprising.
There's three times more coffee nearly went
into this cup than this cup
little taste.
Pleasant, nice acidity.
It's again jam packed full
of flavor has a kind of sweetness to it.
That's quite pleasant.
Let's compare it with this.
Now for me there's a kind of softness
to this cup in comparison to this one,
this one's a little kind of sharper, spikier,
punchier in a way.
That's definitely desirable
I think at a competition
where you're trying to stand out
from the crowd constantly.
This style of brewing
definitely creates a kind of punchier,
bigger almost caricatured version of that coffee.
And if you're starting with really great coffee
you're inevitably gonna amplify
some of those very positive traits.
This style of brew is a little softer,
a little calmer almost,
but it's also less fatiguing.
I could imagine drinking a big full cup of this
and still wanting more coffee being satisfied,
but also wanting more.
This comparatively is a little bit more fatiguing to me.
To drink a lot of this would kind
of blow out my palette.
It would leave me kind of overwhelmed.
I would kind of, a cup, maybe.
And then done, you know,
and obviously caffeine is highly water soluble.
I don't think you've completely extract caffeine,
you know in this kind of a brew method,
but this will have a lot more caffeine
in it than this one here will.
And that matters to me.
And so I think this is fun.
I think this is interesting.
It's a great way to sort of turn up some
of the characteristics of a coffee.
I don't necessarily think you have to go all the way
to an extreme of 30 grams, you know, in the brewer.
I think you could do it with 20
and actually have quite a good result
and you know chewing your a little bit more
to have a kind of punchier, more character for a cup.
But I just really like the balance and complexity
and just satisfaction of this style of brew.
I just think it's just really enjoyable to drink.
It leaves you wanting just a little bit more
which is how I want to finish a cup of coffee.
I want to finish it a little bit sad
because it was so good,
but my preferences are not your preferences.
And so if you've tried my method
and you really don't like it, then that's okay.
You should experiment with what you do.
Like there are loads of techniques out there.
Go check the ultimate technique video.
I left links in the description
of that video for other recipes
for you to try out and have some fun with.
And that brings us to the end of this series.
Now I know some
of you will still have unanswered questions.
Maybe in the future we'll come back
to the AeroPress again.
We'll experiment some more.
But I think for now, hopefully these five videos
have kind of covered everything you might want to know
about brewing with the AeroPress enjoying it more
and give you a kind of guide
to experimenting for yourself.
Discovering more about what
you like and how to get there
in the morning as easily
and enjoyable as possible.
Now I'm kind of curious
to find out what it is
that collectively you'll all demand that I make next.
Maybe it's the I see video.
Maybe it's the Kalita Wave technique.
Maybe it's siphoned brewing.
I don't know, but I'm sure you'll all work it out
and let me know down in
the comments below or alongside that.
Let me know what I did miss out on.
Let me know what we should look
at in a future video whenever that may be.
But for now, I'll say thank you so much
for watching and I hope you have a great day.