(Lounge music) - Welcome to Episode 4 in our AeroPress series. Today we're talking accessories. I've gone out and sought every single AeroPress accessory that I can find and I think we've got some interesting stuff. Now, I can divide them into kind of three groups. We've got group one, which is external accessories, group two, pressurizing filters, and group three, alternative filters. And so we'll work our way through each of the groups and talk about what we've got. As a quick intro, we've got the PUCKPUCK for making cold brew coffee with your AeroPress, we've got this delightful battle station for keeping all your AeroPress accoutrements together and happy, and we've got this, the 2POUR, for splitting your brews. In the second category of pressurized filters, we've got the Fellow Prismo, which I have looked at on this channel before but it must make a return, and also the Joepresso. Finally, in the filtration camp, we've got three choices. We've got a metal filter from Able. Actually, we've got two different discs from them. We've got a cloth AeroPress filter from The Cloth Filter Co. and we've got some premium filter papers from Aesir. Starting at the first group, starting with the first thing, let's talk about the PUCKPUCK. Now, I'm talking about this first because, actually, to use it takes a couple of hours at least because it's a cold dripper. The way it works is actually delightfully simple. This at the top, you put your ice and water into. And here, this little dial will control your drip rate onto your coffee. Now, you don't ever want to have cold brew drip directly onto coffee 'cause it will dig a little hole and it'll kind of build a channel. So what you tend to get are little distribution devices. Now, often, think about the kind of Hario cold drippers, you use filter paper. Here, they've got a little disc that will sit on top of our coffee. Let's put it together. We'll use their recipe, which is 38 grams of coffee, a hundred grams of ice, and 400 grams of cold water on the top and then dripping aiming for about a 2 1/2 to 3-hour brew time. So it's brewing now. We'll come back to it when it's finished. I'll say a couple things now. It's well-built. I quite like how it's put together. It feels premium throughout. It's a little bit fiddly. Dropping the little blue plastic disc on top I got wrong a couple of times. It sort of fell midair and I had to sort of dig it out with a fork to sort of drop it back in and make it nice and level. Kind of annoying, but that might also be my inability to drop a plastic disc straight. So, you know, user error. And then it did take a little bit of effort to sort of get the drops flowing at the rate that they recommended. But once it's set up, it seems pretty easy. We'll come back to you in a little bit. Next up is the 2POUR. It's a simple device. It's a splitter for AeroPress brewing. The idea is you press on top of it and it splits your brewer into two different cups. It's £17 and it's a single piece of plastic. It doesn't feel particularly premium. It feels pretty cheap. The edges aren't beautiful on here. I don't necessarily understand why it's £17 and I don't necessarily understand why it exists because if I had a complaint about the AeroPress is that it doesn't easily make coffee for more than one person. But maybe you're doing the heavy brew and bypass thing, so we should test if it works. And to be ruthless in our testing, we should see how effective it is in splitting the liquid out. So I'll brew a brew. I'll use the AeroPress technique from our previous video, Episode 3, it's up here if you haven't seen it yet, and we'll weigh out the split in liquid and see how good a job it does. I'm having a bit of a moment here because the way I like to brew is I brew on top of the thing I'm gonna press onto. If I do that, then I'll have something dripping. So I'll have to kind of brew onto a carafe, stop, you know, use the plunger to create a vacuum, move it across, or maybe lift it up, pour the liquid into the splitter, that might go badly, and then put this on top and wait and then press. I mean, maybe I'm just supposed to do the inverted method, but you know how I feel about that. So potentially a flaw in the design unless you're just, you know, brewing on here the whole time and you're just kind of winging it in terms of brew water weight. Maybe we do that. Maybe I just give in and just, you know, be free, don't weigh anything. This will stress me out but I think it's the fairest test. Now I'm just gonna guess what 200 mls looks like, or 200 grams, more precisely. Yeah, already a little uneven distribution. We'll see if that bias continues once, you know, we hit some higher flow rates. I have no idea how much liquid I put in there and I find that quite stressful because we know that the amount of liquid that you put in has a massive impact on extraction. So just eyeballing it is not a recipe for success. I wish that wasn't the case but it's true. Let the pressing commence. Like four grams more on this side even though this side had a headstart. So weird distribution as we go. So, yeah, I got it wrong actually. I poured about 30 grams under 200 grams, so. I've gotta say, it's just not for me. For £17 I'd probably spend two or three more pounds and buy a nice glass pitcher that looks beautiful that you can use for other stuff in your life and have in your kitchen and be a multipurpose thing or just something that feels nice and looks nice. For £17, I can't justify this as a kind of object or an accessory for an AeroPress. If you have one and love one, let me know down in the comments below. I'd love to hear from 2POUR users how you feel about it, what you paid for it. Was it worth it? Let's move on. So next up, we have a kind of fun one, which is the Hexnub AeroPress Organizer. They do a sort of double-width one. They do a single-width one too. This is like the double garage version. You know, you could always, though, just sort of split your AeroPress if you don't have two. You could store them separately like that. There you go. Nice, easy. It's not flawlessly made for the money, right? Like, it's not a lot of stuff. The little hex rubber mats are nice enough. I don't really know why you need them, but they're nice enough. This just doesn't quite feel beautifully made or, you know, particularly accurately made, right? It feels a bit wonky in places. The detailing is there. You've got, like, your little scoop holder, your little paddle holder. Overall, you don't quite get what you pay for but I kind of like the idea enough. If this appeals to you, it's an option. Doesn't work for me, but that's just 'cause I wanna hide things away in my life and not have them out on the sides and stuff. Let's move on. So let's brew with the Prismo. I've talked about it on the channel before but we should reassess for this for a couple reasons. The interesting thing here is the inside, you've got this little valve and that restricts your flow. Now, the upside is that if you don't wanna brew inverted, this would stop liquid dripping out of the bottom of your brew if you're brewing the normal way around, right? Before you get the plunger in to sort of create that vacuum effect, this will keep all the water in 'cause this little valve will only open when it's pressurized, when it's pushed open. Now, it does come with this metal filter that is very necessary to sit on top and this will act as a filter. You could put a paper filter on top of this, I think, if you wanted a cleaner brew, but let's get a brew going. Now, we're gonna be using the Smart Espresso Profiling attachment because I wanna see what kind of pressure this thing opens at and see if it lets me generate more pressure because what this thing registers is not just how hard I'm pressing. It's the sort of trapped pressure inside, which is pressure in less whatever pressure is getting out. Now, in a normal AeroPress brew, you've got quite a large open area for pressure to escape, so you can't build high pressures easily. But if you restrict that, similarly, with the Joepresso to come, can you get higher pressures? Let's find out. So this is ready to go. To make things a bit more ridiculous, I'm gonna press on something else to sort of leverage the full potential of the Smart Espresso Profiler. Let me show you. Here I've got the base of a juicer with the juicing attachment gone. I'm gonna press on this and then the scale can sit below and sort of track the flow rate of liquid through the AeroPress so we can sort of have a flow profile as well as a pressure profile. So ready to press. I'm gonna press too hard 'cause I wanna see if I can build more pressure up with this little thing than I could in a normal AeroPress. Let's give it a big press. Hopefully I don't make too much mess. (James grunts, coffee splashes) Whoa! Got a, you know, pretty steady pressure. We hit 1.14 bars there. So not a big change. Let's try that again with a paper filter. So this is the metal-filtered brew and it has something of the taste that we experienced in the testing video, Episode 2, of high-pressure brews. It's got a lot more bitterness than I would really want. It's quite harsh. Obviously it's not particularly filtered so there's a bit more sort of sediment that will add to the bitterness, but I don't think that's the cause. I think brewing at very high pressures is not, for filtered coffee like this, a great idea in the AeroPress. Still, I'm curious how high can we go if we've got a paper and metal. Can I build more pressure with the valve? Maybe make less mess this time. 1.3 bars. Now, let's be clear, do not be tempted, if you've got a setup like this, to get up on your countertop and press with your foot to see how hard you can press. Only a fool would do that. Not recommended at home. (Grunts) Come on now. This is just me currently messing around and trying to understand what effect the Prismo has. It obviously works very well to keep liquid in the AeroPress. So as designed, pretty great. You can add a paper filter. I think that's good. The one thing I wanna test before we compare it to the Joepresso is their kind of pseudo-espresso recipe where you grind espresso fine, right? 20 grams of ground coffee in, I'll use an espresso roast for this, and then 50 grams of water, quite a lot of agitation, and then a reasonably hard press and the metal filter only and, in theory, some crema potentially. But we'll be able to see what kind of pressure we're getting in that environment with this and the Joepresso to see if it's, you know, again, like, a bar, bar and a half, which probably should be enough to create some foam. (coffee dripping) Now, that brew was actually under a 1 to 1.5, so, you know, maybe I should have pressed a little bit more liquid through. I felt like we got to where we needed to go. Brief amount of foam appeared and sort of disappeared on the top but this coffee is never gonna give a ton of crema in these kind of situations. But interestingly, never really above a bar. I think I peaked out at like 0.9 of a bar. Really not bad actually. It's a small strong coffee. It's not espresso strength, but it's not far off actually. It's not wildly underextracted. It's not overly acidic actually. It's interesting. If I was mixing that into something like a milk drink that I was making at home, then that's kind of interesting. That's all right. I'm surprised. Let's compare it to the Joepresso, which does a similar thing in a different way. So this is the Joepresso. Now, it's a bit more expensive than the Prismo. This is about £29, the Prismo about £18. Aiming to do a similar-ish thing but not. So this is trying to do espresso with an AeroPress quite explicitly. You've got some pieces. Here you've got a pressurized basket. So it looks like a normal basket but there's only one exit hole at the bottom, so everything gets constrained there. A little bit like the Prismo valve but different. This you fill with coffee. You tamp it down. Doesn't come with a tamper and this is a nonstandard basket size, so that's a bit awkward. Probably tamp it with this, though, it does have a big kind of nut holding the screen in place. And this acts like the screen of your espresso machine where the water flows out from. So once you've ground your coffee, you put this on top, then you drop it into its little holder cap that will allow you to lock into the AeroPress. You add a little rubber gasket to make sure that there's no leaks as you're pressing very hard. So let's give it a try. So they say for a 2:1 espresso, you wanna add a 3:1 ratio. So I've got 15 grams of coffee. I'm gonna add 45 of water. Now, looking at this, the screen doesn't perfectly cover the grounds. And they also say if you wanna pre-infuse, push just a little bit, like three seconds, and then back off. So I'm gonna press. This is much trickier because you've got a compacted bed of ground coffee, just like espresso, to try and get the water through and it doesn't seem particularly interested in that. So I'm gonna go a little harder. I've got a very small amount of liquid flowing out at this point. So I might surmise that, actually, espresso grind is too fine and, as is kind of common with a pressurized portafilter, you'd wanna grind coarser. Definitely too fine. So this does not need an espresso grind. Now, that last brew was entirely operator error, right? Like, I put the wrong grind of coffee in there. That's my fault. That's not me being negative about the Joepresso. It's not built for real fine espresso grinds. It says fine to medium pre-ground coffee. It's a pressurized basket. So we've gone a bit coarser. You know, close to where I'd actually brew, like, filter coffee for an AeroPress. We'll try that. Interesting, I got up to about a bar. How does it taste? Not great. It tastes underextracted and I think for a roast this light, you would need to grind finer, but I think then you have issues generating enough pressure to get through a finer grind to have it really work. I think this is a device that will be at its best with medium to dark roasts, rather than light roasts. It's an interesting idea. I feel like the pressures you build in an AeroPress, you know, I'm a large man. I weigh a reasonable amount. I can't build more than two bars of pressure using my entire body weight. Hopefully that illustrates how much pressure nine bars really is. But back to this, I think low-pressure espresso brewing with a basket, with a pressurized basket, might give you a little bit of foam on the top of your cup but I don't think it gives you an espresso-like brew or a better brew necessarily. If it was a choice, in a way, between the Prismo and the Joepresso, I'd probably pick the Prismo. It's a little bit more flexible. It works well for filter brewing or that sort of strong espresso-style brewing. This feels a little bit more focused on one thing only. But if you wanna brew with darker roasts and have more of a kind of foamy, espresso-style thing, it's kind of a fun thing to use. It is more expensive than the Prismo, which sort of works against it, but it's also, you know, one person's project rather than a company making one of many products, which is always worth considering. But I'll finish by saying again, the AeroPress does not and cannot make espresso. You can make small strong coffees. They are not what I would define as espresso. That involves brewing at higher pressures. They don't taste like espresso. They don't look like espresso. They aren't espresso in that regard and you just can't generate really high pressures with an AeroPress no matter what you put on this side of it, and that's that. Now, before we talk about the next section, which is, I think, probably the most interesting of these sections, we do need to talk about this video's sponsor, which is Native. When Native approached me about sponsoring a video on the channel, I was kind of curious. And then they sent over a bunch of their plastic-free deodorants and I realized I'd been making a terrible mistake. You see, I'd been living my life just by buying the least offensive plastic-wrapped deodorant from wherever and kind of making do. I didn't really care, and I realized I was missing out, firstly, on a plastic-free experience. This is a paperboard and it just feels nice to use every single day. It's super simple. You just push it up from the bottom. It works really well. They sent me several different deodorants from their range and they all smelt fantastic. In fact, if you're curious, click the link in the description and go and browse the website. They have some amazing scents on offer, and I keep wanting to call them flavors. But who doesn't wanna smell delicious? And on top of that, I like that I look at the ingredients list and I know what these things are. It's full of familiar things, like shea butter or coconut oil, and it's an aluminum-free, paraben-free, and sulfate-free. Like I said, if you're curious, go and click the link below. Have a browse around. Usually, three deodorants are $39. With the code HOFFMANN it's 25% off, making it $29. There's free shipping within the US and they ship to a bunch of other countries too. There's just details down below here. So our final section is the one I'm kind of the most interested in which is a comparison of filtration method. Here's how it's gonna work. I'm gonna brew four brews back to back. Then we're gonna mix them up and I'll do a blind tasting and see if I can pick out which is which 'cause there's a kind theory around filtration and I wanna see if it holds true all the way through to tasting. Now, the four filters we have are the AeroPress classics. Now, these are £7 for 350. So they're about two pence a piece. The Aesir, which are about $10 Canadian or about £6 for 100, which makes them six pence each, so three times the price. The Cloth Filter. This was £4 delivered in the UK. And much like the Able discs here, you get two for £20, the more you use them, the closer they get to free. As I said, same recipe you've seen with everything else. Let's get on and make four AeroPresses back to back. There is gonna be some slurping but we'll cut all the slurps out. You can have one, those of you that like the slurps. I know most of you hate them. So (slurps) there's your one. Feel like that one's metal. It's got, like, a little bit more dustiness to it, like a little bit of chalkiness in there. I'm gonna say that's cloth because it has this kind of richness. It's clean still, but it's got, like, a little bit more weight to it that I think is very pleasant and quite common with cloth. These I would say are the paper brews in the middle. It's not a great scientific test. I feel like that might be the thicker paper but I don't know. Number three. Good, I'm one for one. I feel like I'm gonna go to the safe spot, which is I feel like this was metal. And it is. It's number four. I said this was the original paper, I think. It is the original paper. Okay, good. And then this is the Aesir paper. I just don't know why I looked. Well, we learned that things act in the way that you expect them to. What I mean by that is that the paper has done a better job filtering out all the particles and pieces but the AeroPress paper is thinner and doesn't do as good a job as the Aesir, which is thicker. Now, the difference in taste is incremental and you could say that the Aesir are three times the price or you could say that they're 4p a brew more expensive. If you prize clarity, if you want that pour over, kind of paper-filtered clarity in your cup, I think they're actually a great choice for that. The AeroPress papers work very well. Maybe we'll talk about using more than one paper in the future. But for now, let's talk about the cloth. It's known, I've done a video on cloth brewing, it's up here, that I have a fondness for cloth brewers. That combination of clarity and texture is very enjoyable. But, as we talked about, maintaining cloth is a bit more work. I think for four pounds, it's a relatively cheap investment in your AeroPress brewing. I think there are people doing cloth filters in the US. I'll find some links and leave them in the description below. But I do like cloth brewing if you're willing to do the work to maintain your cloth long term. You know, as a reusable choice, it is a good one. But metal is the much easier long-term reusable choice. Keeping it clean is relatively simple. There's none of the kind of upkeep of cloth. And yeah, you get a brew that is a little bit chalkier, a little bit more bitter, a little bit heavier and siltier, and some people really like that. Some people like that about traditional French press brew. It's not my preference, but that doesn't mean it can't be your preference. As long as you know what you're getting into, I think that's pretty fair. Now, Able make a couple of filters. They are very good. You know, I know people who've used them for a long time and had good results. They're not the only filters on the market. There are a bunch of different metal filters out there. But I just can't buy everything and test everything. But I think they're a good example of a well-made metal filter and I would certainly be comfortable recommending them as a product. Now, there are two other metal filters we've touched on today but not used. One is the one within the Prismo, we didn't really brew a proper brew with it, and then the other Able brewer that comes in that kit. What I will say about finer metal filters is that you do have a little bit less siltiness but it will still taste like a metal-filtered brew. You may have a preference about what kind of level of texture you've comfortable with, and I generally am pro finer holes but it still tastes like a metal-filtered brew. And that's not a bad thing. That's just what it is. Now, we haven't quite finished. We haven't forgotten about the PUCKPUCK that we started a little while ago. So to wrap it up, let's bring that back and have a little taste. So this video's taken a few hours to film and in that time, the PUCKPUCK has finished brewing. It has an uphill battle with me personally because I don't like the taste of cold brew, cold drip coffee very much. But hopefully I can get past my own preference and talk about whether you might like it. Whether it's extracted or not is kind of down to the grind size. I went relatively fine and for a ratio of what is about 76 grams a liter. You're aiming, actually, for quite a strong brew that you might wanna pour over ice that might dilute a little bit more, you know, over time. But let's have a taste for now. Is it strong? Is it tasty? You know, while it's not for me, it has a kind of combination of a slightly oxidized and slightly vegetal characteristic that I find common in almost every coffee brewed this way, I can totally see why people would like that low-acidity, high-body, caramelly kind of undertone that is there. It doesn't really taste like the coffee that we've brewed with in this video, that we brewed hot and tasted a bunch of times, but it has some texture, it has some sweetness. The cup is very clean. It's an AeroPress filter but because there's no pressure and the bed itself is kind of self-filtering, nice clarity to the brew. But, ultimately, you know, it's gonna taste like cold-brewed coffee. And if you like that, well, maybe think about it. For £30, it's well-made. It feels like you're getting value for money. I quite like it. I just don't like the coffee that it makes, but that's a preference thing. That's not about right or wrong. It's not flawed. It's just not for me. In fact, I don't get to keep any of these. Everything on here, like all the stuff I review, gets given away to my Patreon supporters who make videos like this possible, giving me a budget to just go out and buy this stuff. So thank you to them. But now I wanna hear from you down in the comments below. If you've got one of these, how has it been? Have you lived with it? This is me using them a little bit. Have you lived with it for months, weeks, years even? Has your opinion changed? Do you disagree with something I've said? I'd love to hear from you down in the comments below. But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a great day.