An AeroPress brews a clean, concentrated cup in about two minutes, takes up the space of a tall glass, and costs €59 for the Original and €49 for the clear coloured version. The part everyone comes looking for is the paper micro-filters, €10 a pack: the manufacturer states 350 filters per pack, standard size, good for AeroPress Original, Clear, Go, Premium, Steel and Go Plus, and no use at all on the XL. At one coffee a day, a pack lasts most of a year.
That is the practical half. People usually arrive here for one of two reasons: either you want to drink well in a kitchen with no room and six minutes to spare, without paying what an espresso machine costs, or you already own one and the cup comes out different every morning without you knowing which of your own habits is doing it.
We sell the AeroPress, so read us with a hand on your wallet. That is exactly why the honest section, the one about what this thing cannot do, sits near the top instead of buried at the bottom.
AeroPress filters: how many in a pack, which models take them, and what the paper does
The Paper Micro-Filters cost €10. The manufacturer states 350 filters per standard pack, compostable and biodegradable, compatible with AeroPress Original, Clear, Go, Premium, Steel and Go Plus, with the single exception of the XL, which takes a size of its own. Rough arithmetic: at one cup a day a pack lasts most of a year, at two cups a little under six months.
The paper does a precise job, and it is worth understanding, because it is what separates this cup from one made in a moka pot or a French press. The microscopic holes hold back the finest particles, the ones that would go on extracting inside the cup and turn it steadily more bitter, and the paper absorbs part of the oils, which are what leave the greasy sensation and the film on the palate. Put that together with the immersion happening above it, where the coffee sits in the water long enough to give up its body, and you get the thing an AeroPress does better than anything else its size: a cup that is full and clean at once, with no silt at the bottom and none of that dryness left on the tongue.
One filter at a time is the simple road, and with 350 in the pack there is no reason to ration them. The one habit worth keeping is rinsing the filter first: it costs five seconds and takes the taste of wet paper out of the way, which otherwise lands straight in the first half of the cup.
Does an AeroPress make espresso?
No, and it is worth knowing before you buy. You will read the opposite in plenty of places, and we understand why: the coffee comes out dark and concentrated with a little foam on the surface. An espresso is born from nine bars of pressure held for twenty-five or thirty seconds on a compressed puck, and your arms deliver a fraction of that force. What you get is an intense, thoroughly drinkable concentrate, without the dense crema and without the syrupy body of a machine shot. If the small cup from an Italian bar is what you are after, this brewer will disappoint you, and we would rather say so now than handle a return in a fortnight.
There is a second case where the right answer sits somewhere else. If what you love is the large, pale, fragrant cup, the one you drink slowly while you read and that tastes of tea and fruit, then the ceramic V60 does that job better, because slow percolation separates the aromatics with more delicacy. The AeroPress gives a smaller, denser cup. Which of the two roads is yours is the subject of filter coffee and espresso, and it is worth settling before you buy anything at all.
The recipe we start from
This is the starting point we hand anyone who asks, and it is built to be repeatable rather than spectacular. From here you adjust by tasting, changing one thing at a time.
- Weigh 15 g of coffee and grind it right then, medium-fine, somewhere between fine salt and granulated sugar.
- Heat the water and let it stand for a minute off the boil: you are around 90 °C (194 °F), the zone where sweetness comes out without dragging bitterness along with it.
- Rinse the filter in the cap with a little hot water, which takes the paper taste away and warms the cup.
- Pour 200 g of water onto the coffee, stir for ten seconds with the paddle that comes in the box, and seat the plunger straight away without pressing, so no air gets in and the extraction stays even.
- At one minute thirty from the start, plunge, slowly, taking about thirty seconds over it. When you hear the hiss of air, stop.
If the cup comes out sharp and hollow, the coffee has not given enough: grind finer, or stretch to two minutes. If it comes out bitter and drying, it has given too much: grind coarser, or shorten. If you like a longer drink, add hot water directly to the cup rather than stretching the brew, because that changes the strength without touching the balance. The full reasoning about what happens inside those ninety seconds is in our guide to coffee extraction.
The inverted method, without the snobbery
The inverted method exists for one reason: to stop water dripping through the filter while the coffee is still steeping, so the contact time is yours from the first second to the last. You assemble the AeroPress upside down, plunger at the bottom and the chamber open at the top, add coffee and water, stir and wait. Then you screw on the cap with the filter already rinsed, flip the whole thing onto the cup in one decisive movement with both hands, and press.
With the same doses you can let it steep a full two minutes before flipping, and the result is a slightly sweeter, rounder cup. It is how we brew it nearly always. There is no separate bloom in this recipe, because the stir at the start wets everything at once and does that work; the only precaution is doing the flip over the sink for the first few goes.
Original or Clear: which one to buy
The AeroPress Original costs €59 and is the classic tool, the one this whole story started with. The AeroPress Clear & Color costs €49, is made from transparent Tritan and comes in seven colours, from clear to black, and the manufacturer states the same performance in the cup.
The practical difference is that with the Clear you watch the coffee working, and while you are learning, seeing the water darken and the level drop helps more than it sounds. The coffee that comes out is the same, so the choice comes down to looks and price, and the fact that the transparent version costs ten euros less is one of those things there is no sense in hiding from you.
What you need next to it, and what you can skip
Two things and a half. The first is whole beans and a grinder, because a cup this clean shows the grind in full: if you are kitting out now, the grinders and scales we keep are the place to look, and a Comandante C40 on an AeroPress is a pairing that holds for years. The second is a scale, and here a kitchen scale that reads to the gram genuinely does the job: weighing the dose is the single gesture that removes half the bad mornings, and a scale with a built-in timer is comfort rather than necessity.
The half thing is water. If yours runs very hard, the coffee comes out flat and the aromatics shorten, and switching to a low mineral bottled water changes the cup more than a new brewer would.
Which coffee to put in it
The AeroPress rewards coffees with something to say, because the paper lifts the veil and leaves acidity and aromatics in the front row. Washed African and Central American coffees, with their citrus and floral brightness, open up beautifully here, and an Ethiopia Sidamo or a Colombia Golden Huila tells you far more in this cup than it ever will in a moka pot. If you prefer something sweet and round, the Brazils with their chocolate and caramel are the reassuring road, and they stay clean even with a few extra seconds of steeping.
We roast them ourselves in Albenga, on the Ligurian coast: they are all here, each with its own sensory profile. For the method you have just read, ground fresh.
Questions and answers
How many filters come in an AeroPress pack?
The manufacturer states 350 paper micro-filters in the standard pack, which costs €10 with us. At one coffee a day that covers most of a year.
Do AeroPress Go filters fit the Original?
Yes. The standard filter is the same for Original, Clear, Go, Premium, Steel and Go Plus, because the chamber diameter is identical. The only model that wants a filter of its own is the AeroPress XL.
What grind size does an AeroPress need?
Medium-fine, halfway between fine salt and granulated sugar, finer than French press and coarser than espresso. From there you adjust: finer if the cup comes out watery and sharp, coarser if it comes out bitter.
Can you use an AeroPress for iced coffee?
Yes, and it works very well with the Japanese method: you build the cup with the same doses but put 70 g of ice in the receiving vessel and drop the hot water to 130 g. The coffee lands boiling on the ice, melts it immediately and locks the aromatics in on the way down, giving a fresh, sharp cup that slow cooling would never get you.
Of everything we sell, the AeroPress is the one we recommend most often to people who tell us they would like to drink better and have no idea where to start. It costs little, it is learned in a week, it asks for no space, and it has the rare virtue of making it obvious what changes when you change something: it is the cheapest way we know to work out your own taste.
The AeroPress Original in our shop: with a bag of fresh coffee next to it, tomorrow morning the cup is already a different thing.