New AeroPress - help, tips and coffee recommendations please

[Stollenandsnow]

DD loves coffee, both hot and cold, seen good recommendations for the AeroPress so bought her one for Xmas.

Well, unless we are using it incorrectly it’s a bit crap! I bought a bag of standard ground coffee from Aldi (maybe this is the problem) and DD decided to have an iced coffee. She followed the instructions with the paper in the filter, screwed it on, one scoop of coffee and filled the press to 1 with water and stirred for a few minutes. By this time all the liquid had already run straight through and made half a cup of weak coffee.

Started again with hot water, 1 scoop, filled to level 1 and waited a few minutes plunged the plunger and it’s made a very small cup of coffee that by the time DD had added some milked was pretty much cold.

So what are we doing wrong? If you want a large cup or mug of coffee will you need 3 scoops and fill to 3? A bag of coffee won’t last long!

Have I bought the wrong coffee? How can you make it stay hot? Or is it one scoop, fill to 1 then top up with boiling water?

Any tips or advice would be welcome please!

1. Use finer ground coffee. Illy espresso in the silver tins is good.
2. Google Aeropress inverted method and some bearded hipster guy will explain it in a video

For now, one scoop, fill to the brim, leave 4 mins for cafetiere grind, invert onto the cup at the last minute. This makes a long strong hot coffee.

You need really fine coffee, espresso ground. I've got a grinder which is great but I appreciate it's another bit of kit needed to work a 20 quid coffeemaker 🤯 Does make bog standard Aldi beans taste nice though.

I don't think it makes much difference if you leave it a few minutes or not, I just stir the coffee+water. You should end up with about 1.5cm of nearly black coffee in the cup which is roughly equivalent of a coffee shop espresso.

Coffee shops that sell beans will grind them for you, probably even to the exact size for an aeropress who is ideally between espresso and cafetiere.

I use a bodum manual milk frother to froth milk heated in the microwave but you can just put hot milk in the coffee. I reckon to make a rough equivalent of an Americano top the espresso up with boiling water then with warm milk.

I make a cappuccino with just the espresso then the rest filled up with frothy milk but it is very milky - officially it's supposed to be milk frothed with steam.

Good luck!

Definitely use the inverted method so it brews for longer. It produces an espresso which you can then obviously add additional hot water and milk to for your lattes.

One of the nice things about it is developing your own technique.
TK Maxx/Homesense is a good source of espresso grind coffee, look for the vacuum sealed tins about £3.99. Random Italian brands but they are all nice.

There are some good you tube videos..I also use the inverted method..found on you tube. It’s takes a while to get what you like..experiment.. I use Taylor’s ground Italian coffee.

I find the inverted method much better too.

Partner says 2 scoops of coffee.

Fill with hot water to the '2' line 😁 yum

Have you got an original one or the Go one? I got DH the Go for Christmas. He made himself a couple of lovely cups of coffee, and then I tried making him one. The water went straight through - turns out I hadn't fully tightened it.

I bought it from an online coffee supplier and bought him some coffee to go with it which was specifically ground for an aeropress.

1 scoop and fill it to 2 1/2 I never see the point of diluting coffee with water afterwards. It helps to pour the water in slowly gently, I started off using the inverted method, but it was a bit of a delicate operation, so now I just go a bit slower.
If you want a long milky coffee then you would be better with a mokapot and even then you would probably need to heat the milk.

Thanks all, lots of great tips, I’ve ordered some Illy coffee with the Tesco order that’s coming tomorrow, see if that’s better.

We’ll give the inverted method a go today, it’s the original AeroPress she has - we’ll have a little play with it and see which way works best for her.