My Review of the Aerobie Aeropress

Okay.  I was going to do a video review, with sweet edits and voiceovers, but then I realized I didn't want to.  This is what you get.  It's going to be long, and you'll have to sift through a lot of digression and unnecessary parentheticals.  All photos are from the Aeropress website because, again, easier.

The Aeropress is, quite simply, a single-serve coffee maker.  It's very elegant; no moving parts, no electricity (great for camping, hotel stays, or being Amish), no time-consuming maintenance, descaling, brush detailing, etc. It's made by the good people at Aerobie, the same company that brought us the Aerobie Superdisc and a bunch of other arcane products only known to a frisbee subculture which apparently slinks in the margins of society and has conventions where people stand around, looking ashamed, and talk about frisbees.

Anyway, yeah, it makes coffee, and it really just makes one cup at a time.  Two, tops.  It doesn't steam or froth milk (look at it and tell me you expected it to) and, while it professes to make espresso, you're not going to be able to produce the PSI necessary to extract crema, so it can't necessarily do that either.  But, if you're like me, you visualize the Espresso Drinker Convention in the banquet room down the hall from the Frisbee Enthusiast Convention, and what you want is a nice hot cup of delicious coffee.  Can do.

The device itself consists of three parts: the plunger, the chamber, and the filter holder.  When you buy one, you'll also get a grounds funnel (not super necessary), a custom grounds scoop (very, very necessary), a custom stirring paddle (moderately necessary), and a supply of 350 filters.  All pieces are constructed of what appears to be high quality plastic, although I'm not sure if it's the kind that causes cancer.  But, hey, you're about to enjoy a liquid made from burnt up, ground up fruit pits, so you're familiar with living on the edge.

Here's how you'll make a cup of coffee.  First, start heating up a kettle of water.  The instructions will tell you that taste testers preferred it at 175 degrees F, but I'd bet that's mainly because you can't taste a damn thing if you drink it at near boiling temperatures, and you'll scorch your tongue besides.  So do your best; boil it and let it cool for a minute or use a thermometer if you're the type who attends the Temperature Measurement Device Convention.

While the water is heating, place the assembled chamber on top of your favorite sturdy mug (10-12 oz) and drop in two custom scoopfuls of fairly fine grounds.  I've found that Ditting #4 works best.  Now, slowly pour in your heated water up to the convenient #2 line on the chamber.  Use the paddle to give it all a stir for several seconds.  This is the important part, as it immerses the grounds completely, thus ensuring even extraction and consistent flavor, two things you won't get from your Mr. Coffee machine or the $10,000 commercial brewers at Starbucks.

Okay, now wet the rubber seal on the plunger, stick it in the top of the chamber, and slowly, gently press down.  You are now putting the air in the chamber to work; it's forcing the hot water through the coffee grounds and into your cup, where you'll find a moderate amount of quasi-espresso.  Remember the photo from up top, with the cute little digitally superimposed coffee droplets?  Like that.

Fill up your mug with some more hot water, and you've done it.  Apart from waiting for the water to heat, total brew time is about 30 seconds.

Cleanup is so, so easy, and this is one of the best parts.  Remember how much fun it was to clean your press pot?  Remember dumping out the sludge, washing away the residue, and picking grounds out of the plunger mesh with a toothbrush?  You'll be sad to hear that the Aeropress shoots a compact, steaming puck of grounds into your trashcan (or at your roommate) and cleans up with a quick rinse.  Dishwasher top rack is fine if you're that neurotic, Mommie Dearest.

How does it taste?  Well, probably different than what you're used to.  Because of the short extraction time, you will experience very little bitterness and may better sense and appreciate origin characteristics.  You'll taste the lemon in your Sidamo and the berries in your Kenya.  There's no sediment and relatively little oil, but it's still a rich cup.  Interestingly, this method seems to bring out the acidity in African coffees without cranking it to 11 in Latin American coffees, which is nice.  I've given a couple Indonesians a try and wasn't thrilled, but then again those were old beans.

Oh yeah, about the beans.  I need to emphasize that this thing uses a great deal of grounds per cup.  However, that's by design; you're trading more coffee for a shorter brew cycle, and this is a good thing because you get optimal flavor with no butt aftertaste.  Even if you're a one-cup-at-a-time guy like me, you will go through a pound quickly.  For this reason, I would recommend you use your press or standard brewer (as well as your palatable mass-market bean blends) for family and guests, and hide a nice single-origin for you, your sweetheart, and your Aeropress.  In my experience, this thing rewards your choice of better beans with a really special cup of coffee.

Maintenance: filter refills are inexpensive can be purchased from the Aerobie website, as well as Amazon, or I guess you could hand trace and cut your own from larger supermarket filters.  You freak.

So that's the review.  I would recommend the Aeropress for coffee lovers and impulsive gadget buyers.  Billy Mays would never sell this thing, but that's only because he's dead.  If you have any questions, let me know and I'll answer as best I can.

Christmas List 2K9

Not really expecting to receive (m)any of these things, but it's fun to window shop.

In descending price order:

AKAI E2 Head Rush

This Gap vest, size M, color Blue Galaxy

A capo similar or identical to this

One or two-year subscription to Mental Floss magazine

Flight of the Conchords Season 2

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Cure Songs That Belong on Sesame Street

I happened to see this while flipping through Hulu's Sesame Street archives:

I think we can all agree it's amazing.  But then I got to thinking about other washed-up bands whose back catalogs could benefit today's PBS kids.  The answer is obvious: The Cure.

Think about it.  Many of their radio singles qualify as both educational and informational:

• Friday I'm In Love: an upbeat, happy way to learn the days of the week!
• Lovecats: clearly better than the current background music for this:

• Lovesong: Uh... hmm.  Maybe Robert Smith and Snuffy's dad could sing a duet to him for this unaired episode.
• Boys Don't Cry: ... I give up.

Wish For Authenticity

Today a Starbucks regional manager humiliated one of my store's shift supervisors to tears because he didn't like the cappuccino she made.  Never mind that it probably was bad because most people at Maple Street make drinks incorrectly (and we're still the best store in the city); that's not the point.  The point is that there are right and wrong ways to motivate people to do better at their jobs, and someone in middle management should presumably be hip to one or two right ways (hint: not making girls cry).  If I weren't outside on my break when it happened, I might have been leaving Starbucks a little earlier than planned.  I can belittle with the best of them and I'm not afraid to do it to people two or three pegs above me.


I had a few more paragraphs ready, but in the interest of keeping this post relatively accessible, suffice it to say that this breakdown in motivation is part of a growing trend.  For example, a key component of encouraging product sales is creating credible products (I'm looking at you, VIA).  Here's another one: if you want happy, productive employees, offer incentives to balance penalties.  Stock bonus?  Lunch?  Extra markout, even though that's more like punishment when I have a whole cupboard full of coffee I'll never use?


This concludes today's rant.

Keeping Up Appearances

It is hard as hell to find a decent theme, or template, or whatever, for this blog.  Except the look to change frequently over the next few days (weeks?).

In other news, my World of Warcraft account should sell either today or tomorrow, at which point I will pool that money with birthday money and visit Guitar Center.  Mexican Telecaster?  Chinese Les Paul?  Something else?

Of course, if you give a mouse a guitar, sooner or later he's going to want to play it.

Writing Wrongs

Keeping a blog is only slightly different than keeping a diary, which is only slightly different than talking to yourself at the grocery store and making people really nervous.

Einstein Was a Cute Kid

Okay, so first of all, this is one of the oddest framings of the problem of evil I’ve seen thus far.  I’ll refrain from ranting about the incorrect assertions and broad generalizations about the nature of heat and light, because that’s not the point I’m trying to make.

More importantly, Einstein never said anything of the sort, or at least none of his biographers felt compelled to mention it.  Einstein was more apt to say things like this:

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

So what we have is a Christian organization with the best of intentions presenting its video sales pitch, yet inadvertently (I hope) tainting it with the spirit of error.  The closest approximation to anything said in this video would have originally come from St. Augustine of Hippo, who posited that evil was in fact the absence of good.  But mention Augustine of Hippo to the man on the street, and you’ve immediately lost him to childhood nostalgia:

No, it’s better to misattribute this concept to someone who is irrefutably intelligent by popular consensus… someone like Albert Einstein.

And that’s exactly what people have done ever since Einstein’s theory of general relativity began altering our perception of the world around us.  Evangelists for all sorts of causes, from Christianity to Buddhism to astrology, have misattributed quotes and concepts to Einstein in an attempt to imbue them with greater credibility.


The thing is, it’s a nice story even without involving the late revolutionary theoretical physicist (who, incidentally, seems to have been either a deist or pantheist).  Everyone likes it when the student confounds the teacher, and everyone roots for religion to topple the ivory tower of science (as if the two were irreconcilably opposed).  Surely it’s not too flimsy to stand in its own?


At any rate, theodicy is a pretty neat concept.  Good black-coffee-and-quiet-room reading.  Let’s come together and forge new explanations and understandings of the nature of evil, shall we?  You go ahead and get started.  I’ll be over here playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.