Small coffee shop in Alba, Italy
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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It’s a very forgiving method, unlike the moka pot. If you use a scale, and keep all numbers reasonable, the result will be reasonably good too. Finer details don’t really matter very much unless you’re highly trained in tasting finer flavor notes. Most people can’t tell if the temperature, particle size or extraction time was a little bit off.
Moka pot is a very different beast. It’s very easy to go from delicious coffee to bitter rat poison in a few seconds if you’re not paying attention.
I personally find the Moka pot to be more consistent for me personally, as long as you keep the temperature from getting to high and take it off the heat before the bubbly too hot water comes out it's bang on. With an Aeropress I could never figure out how to make it well consistently.
If you keep on using your moka pot that way, you can get great coffee every time. You just need to keep an eye on it. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to screw it up, whereas with the areropress screwing it up requires borderline criminal negligence. As long as you weigh the grinds and water, AP produces very consistent results for me. If you happen to be an experienced taster, you can probably notice if the grind size, temperature or extraction time is a little bit off.
I’ve tried a bunch of side-by-side comparisons and I can tell you that I’m not quite that experienced, so I don’t need to worry about the finer details that much. As long as both weights are within a reasonable range, the coffee ends up being really good every time.
The Aeropress is dead simple: I haven't found much of a difference, taste wise, when using 14 to 18.5 grams of beans. I usually stick with 18.5g at a relatively coarse grind size (65 on my DF64 if that means anything to you, it goes from 100 which is really coarse to 1 which is extremely fine, like for Turkish Coffee, well below espresso, which is usually in the 12-15 range), grind my beans fresh, and use boiling water since I largely drink medium or light roasts. I let it brew for 2.5 minutes and it's damn good every time. I've even let it brew for like 7 minutes when I forgot to set a timer, thinking it was going to be disgusting swill and it was only a bit bolder than what I was used to. It's pretty hard to mess up an Aeropress brew IMO.
I have yet to use a Moka Pot, but I have used it's hardcore big brother, the 9Barista Espresso "machine". I don't use it often because it's a bit of a pain in the ass, it takes like 10 minutes to make a single shot of espresso since there's no moving parts (except for the valves) and you have to heat up a huge chunk of steel on a stove. My brother looked it over and said it's essentially a reverse Whiskey still.
That thing can easily go from "this is pretty good" to "OMG WTF happened?!?" pretty quickly since it's damn near impossible to standardize all the variables (temperature, brewing time, grind size, bean type, water quality, etc..). I've had it for like 2 years now and it's pretty rare for me to have a good cup of espresso from one roaster to the next. I use Trade Coffee, so my coffee roasters are different with every bag I get.
Oh, you have one of those. I think I’ve seen a review of it on YT. Seems like the type of machine that requires some skill to operate successfully.
Yeah it's more of a novelty. I had a lot of money to blow at the time, and it was during the COVID lockdown so I splurged. I blame James Hoffman for me buying it 🤣 It's a pain in the ass to use effectively and to get a consistent shot of espresso out of. I don't use it often because it takes like 10 minutes of prep and brewing to make something I'll drink in 30 seconds.
YEP.