By now you have seen one in action, probably at your favourite coffee shop. In a scene that was becoming defined more by the aesthetics of machinery than by the taste of the coffee, the AeroPress arrived looking like a school science experiment and costing less than thirty dollars. Its devotees swear by it. There is a world championship.
We spoke to Alan Adler, who invented it, about coffee and about how the thing came to exist at all.
The first thing to know about Adler is that he is an inventor and a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Stanford, and that his inventions are born in a machine shop in his garage in Palo Alto. Some readers will know him better for the Aerobie — the flying ring that has held two world records for the furthest distance an object has been thrown. When we asked what prompted the move from frisbees to coffee, he said he had simply been tinkering with a way to make a better cup.
Approaching the problem as a scientist rather than as an enthusiast has evidently paid off. “The problem with most coffee makers is that they run too hot,” Adler told us. “There are very, very few coffee makers that allow the user to choose the brewing temperature.”
When the AeroPress was being introduced, the tasting panel ran from ordinary coffee drinkers through to professional tasters and authors. “We had a lot of people who were quite knowledgeable about coffee tell us, oh, you can’t possibly brew coffee at that temperature,” he says. “Every single one liked coffee best at 175 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Sit with that for a moment. Every single one. Against their own stated expertise, and against the number printed on almost every kettle sold for the purpose.
The standard method
Nothing exotic, and photographed in our kitchen in 2014. This is the upright orientation, which is what Adler himself uses and which is a good deal less likely to end with hot coffee on the counter.
You will also see people brewing it upside down — the inverted method, where the press is assembled the wrong way up so nothing drips through while it steeps. We shot it at the time. It works. It also involves flipping a cylinder of near-boiling coffee over a mug, which is a lot of risk to eliminate about four grams of drip.
One more thing Adler was keen on, and it is the sort of detail that tells you what kind of person builds a thing like this: the filter. “You get much more filtration than you get simply from the paper alone,” he says — the plastic cap and the paper working together.
And the whole object is made in America. “Everything is made in the US, right here in California. Even the filters are made in the US, although they come from the East Coast, made from trees grown in the US.”
A man in a garage in Palo Alto made the most reliable coffee brewer most people will ever own, for under thirty dollars, and then let a taste panel tell him he was right about the temperature. We think about that a lot.