AeroPress: Our Top Tips for Better Extraction

We've said it 185739 times, and we'll say it again, we love the AeroPress! For such a smart, affordable and portable piece of kit; it really makes a great coffee. Our AeroPress comes on every trip we go on, as we love to have specialty coffee everywhere. There's nothing we love more when a new My Single Friend Single Origin Coffee comes out, than trying it out on the Aeropress. So, with that, we want to show you how we make our Aeropresses at Rosso, and what we do to get the best extraction each time....

Our Recipe

Our recipe is simple. No fancy pouring techniques, no high tech kettle or weird swirling. Just coffee, water, FLIP, and press.

We take the inverted method when it comes to making an Aeropress, which means starting by turning the Aeropress so it is plunger-side down, pictured below.

We try and free up as much space as possible in the AeroPress before adding 15g of ground coffee. This is ground slightly more coarse than espresso but still on the finer side. 

Next, we start a stopwatch and pour 230g of hot water quickly into the AeroPress.

When the time elapsed reaches 1 minute. We screw on the cap (with a dampened filter paper inside) and flip the whole system and hold over a mug.

We then gently press out the contents of the AeroPress into the mug, aiming to be fully pressed by 1 minute 30 on the stopwatch. And that's it!

Just 1 minute 30 seconds until a great cup of coffee.

Our Top Tips

1. Weigh it all out.

We recommend having a weighing scale under the AeroPress when pouring the water, to ensure a precise amount of water is added to prevent any watery tastes from inconsistent pouring. After a while you might be able to do this by guesstimating by eye - but our tip is to use a weighing scale at first. 

2. Dampened Filter Paper

When using filter paper, we dampen the filter paper before adding to the AeroPress cap. This is a great way to ensure the filter paper evenly sticks to the cap, but also distributes water evenly across the coffee grounds.

3. Keeping Time

We recommend a stopwatch to ensure the coffee grounds do not linger too long in the brewing coffee. Keeping to one minute of extraction time, before pressing out, will mean the coffee doesn't sit too long and make an over-extracted bitter taste. 

4. Preheat the AeroPress

Running some hot water into the AeroPress and pouring out is a great way to preheat the AeroPress and ensure the temperature of the brewing coffee stays nice and high to keep extracting the beautiful flavours of the coffee. 

5. Stir Technique 

When you've poured all of the water in to the AeroPress, it's recommended to gently stir the grounds in a back and forth motion GENTLY! Rather than swirling. We want the grounds to not be too disturbed by stirring, as we want them to pass on their flavours into the hot water as it brews. 

When we try new coffees , we sometimes have to change our recipe. This can mean grinding more coarsely/finely, letting the grounds sit in the water for longer/shorter or changing our water temperature slightly. So make sure you're open to tweaking the recipe when trying new beans.