what's up everyone Lance Hedrick here and today I've got three air press tips for [Music] you airpress is arguably one of the most beloved Brewing devices on the market it made its debut around 20 years ago and has still captivated the pallets of people around the world there have been scads of recipes posted online that have been competed with in different championships and so it can be a bit overwhelming for you at home to kind of figure out what works best for you today I'm going to give you three tips that will help you dial in your coffee to your taste preferences now these tips might be against some of the commonly understood ways of approaching the Aeropress so I asked that you have an open mind as we go through this to see if they make tasti your cups for you cuz that is what we are here for tasty cups I'm not going to be doing my recipes on here because it is slightly different we're focusing on the OG one of the claims to fame of the air press is you can make an espresso like beverage with it because of this a lot of people have turned to pushing really hard in a way that emulates I guess a pump or a lever on an espresso machine the harder you press on your air press the more colloids and undissolved compounds are going to get into your final cup so my first tip is actually to push much more slowly I know that some of you might be like that's G to take even longer but the difference is massive I pushed through in 6 seconds or so a really quick powerful push just to show the two different sides of the equation this one I spent about a minute just slowly pressing through it the ideal filtration unit in an air press in any extraction is the coffee bed itself when you push really hard you are forcing a lot of things that otherwise wouldn't make it through to make it through then what we're going to do is pour the resulting liquid through V60 paper filters and what you're going to see will kind of demonstrate exactly what I'm talking about so again this one was the hard press this is the one where we push really hard in order to maybe get a thicker body which we definitely were uh able to achieve because we saw that cloudy Brew but it's also going to have more stringency more bitterness and a less enjoyable texture in general because we're going to have we're going to have a much more rough experience due to all of those things that have made it through the filtration units I ain't got time for that look at that choke it's just dripping at a very slow rate because the majority of that has been fully clogged lots of things have been caught in that filter lots of fines lots of particles in general and likely a lot of colloids that have been stuck inside the filter that would not be ideal on the pallet now we will do the slow pressed one so let's start the timer and we'll have a little spillage but it's okay all right there we go 34 35 seconds and we have the filter is completely gone there's a little bit at the very tip but that's just going to be difficult to get out without any contact points maybe if we put it on on the side it'll go slow press similar to a V60 in the sense that the flavors are really clean really clear but it's really juicy it has a much nicer mouth feel than what you could ever get on something like a V60 or an origami or an ory or something like that this one obviously has a much thicker body but it's rougher on the tongue it's kind of like um it has drying aspects about it it has a little AR stringency on the Finish still a decent cup don't get me wrong but definitely this is my preference it's much more sparkling much more clear much more clean in general granted this one had you know a bit more contact time because we were pressing so slowly the bit that was left was having more exposure to the slurry but in reality these are similar extraction yields and you just have one that tastes a lot better than the other the next tip for better air presses is actually something I didn't do in the first one cuz I didn't want to ruin the surprise but it's actually to bloom your coffee blooming doesn't matter nearly as much when you're doing the inverted method but that's a less and less common practice nowadays because of the potential injury whenever you're doing that but when you do the typical air press having a bloom and having no Bloom have a big big difference you will notice if you pour it all in at once you have a lot of liquid that drips through into that Final Cup now that liquid is going to to be severely undere extracted very teal likee not much coffee in it at all and that's because in order for extraction to really occur those grounds need to be saturated quite well okay we're up to the four now I would put the plunger on and we move it over all right so we have 20.5 G so let's get a little swirl on there I'm takeing samp the grounds need to be saturated in order for diffusion to begin to occur because they need to be degassed the water needs to actually get all the way into the grounds before you're able to really start to extract the yummies if you want to get to taste Town it takes a little time this time I'm going to bloom it for about 45 seconds and Pour It Up just shy of number four to take into account what may have dropped into the cup when you do a bloom you have some minimal amount of water that goes through but because the bed absorbs roughly twice its weight in water you're able to actually use a lot of that water to get that saturation point up and allow the diffusion to occur when you pour the rest of your water in so as you can see there are still droplets because the it the the grounds aren't so efficient to be able to suck all up all that water immediately so some does make it through but then after about 45 seconds We'll pour the rest of the water in and we'll stop it at that 20.5 G or as close as we can get all right so we stopped it at 21 it's quite close not ideal because when measuring concentrations you want it to be identical but I think this is good enough for our purposes this one was at 3.56 whereas the previous one was at 2.10 that is a huge increase in the amount that was able to get into that Final Cup meaning we're not diluting the beverage as much we're getting more of that extraction early on so you're not having to waste a lot of water diluting your Brew you can have a more efficient extraction with that blooming phase you may still prefer a more a weaker extraction which is absolutely fine I'm not someone that advocates for 26% extraction but just know that you can use less water for more flavorful Brew if you're using the bloom now the final tip is probably the most counterintuitive and it's because it's been drilled in your head for so long that it's going to be hard to shake off it deals with grind size oh on our grinder this range is for espresso this range is for mocha poot on the other end this is French press this is kimx a lot of times you see people adding aor press range which is on a the very fine side of things Alan Adler the inventor of the a press didn't even grind that finely he went a lot cooler and a bit coarser but over time people started to go really fine because they were trying to emulate espresso with the a press I'm not saying that finally air presses don't taste good but what I am saying is a lot of you get stuck in this mindset that it must be really fine for it to be an air press that's simply not the case the courser you go the more even the flow through that coffee bed so with every Brew method I always recommend people to start as coar as you can really go and then you go finer and finer until you land on The Sweet Spot the more fine you go the more potential stringency the finer you go the flow through the puck might be more and more un even it's not bad to let that sit a little bit longer in fact Jonathan G A friend of mine has a 10-minute air press recipe that a lot of people really like think about coffee cuppings you people don't even start sipping those till the 10-minute marker anyway as an immersion Brew sits for a long time especially because there's no real percolation going on it's not going to affect the extraction that much Beyond minute marker 3 because what is capable of being extracted wants to come out pretty quickly especially depending on your grind size and your water temperature a little bonus one is I also recommend not going super hot and I recently posted a video right here of a weird AER pressed recipe where you're using 78 to 80° water and it tastes really great I never really go over 95° even with the lightest of light roasts on an air press and there A lot of times it's only around 90 or 91° if not even cooler than that and what I find is a direct correlation between that and the perceived bitterness I will put Jonathan G's blog post below about what is causing EST stringency based off conversations between himself and S SM everything that I kind of try and do is to reduce bitterness reduce harshness reduce that accurate perception and reduce astringency wonder how it tastes now I like to do 15 G of coffee I like to do 250 g of water just like on my V60 I might up that amount of coffee to 16 gram for maybe medium roasted coffees and up to 17 gram if you like darker roasted coffees you can go coarser obviously and I do on occasion especially if it's maybe a really old coffee or a really uh processed coffee this is a washed coffee so I go a little finer than my usual I do around 92° C if you're at medium maybe go to 88 if you're at dark maybe go to like 82 to 84 and just play around with that first things first I always like to level the bed in here if you just dump it in and start pouring you can have a much shallower part on one side of the bed which can allow water to immediately get into that cup we want to make sure as much water as possible is retained in that bed during our bloom in fact if you have a mellow drip or something that can allow you to just barely like wet the on the top and it'll go through the bed more slowly that can be a really good thing you can kind of swirl it to help even out the the the wetness of the bed but I'm going to pour nice and slow let the water stream kind of break up before it hits the bed so it doesn't penetrate as deep that way I can control kind of how much water is getting through into the mug during that balloon I like to give it a swirl just to make sure everything is nicely wetted as you see we had some drops coming through once I swirled it but it pretty much stayed in there before the swirl occurred now as you notice I'm not getting the kettle back up to Temp I'm not very worried about temperature with aor press once we do that push through it actually AIDS in some of that like emuls emulsifying and it forces through a lot of that liquid retain ratio that could be in the grounds we're getting a a pretty pretty solid extraction with this with this Brew method so at 45 seconds I'm going to pour up to 250 I do a kind of little circle just to make sure all the grounds are integrated and I just kind of pour in the center nothing super fancy on the pour itself getting it up to 250 relatively quickly there we are and then I just set the plunger right at the top to kind of stop the drops coming through move it to the side because you don't want to press onto a scale and I give it a little swirl just like so now I'm going to wait till the 2-minute mark So we had 45 second Bloom then with all the water in we let it sit about a minute 15 you can of course go longer than this if you don't feel like it had adequate extraction it won't extract a ton more after 2 minutes but it will continue to extract certainly so overall it'll be about a 3 minute process from the first drop to the final go so as you see I'm barely pushing at all it's almost just the weight of my hand just barely pushing which allows for more clean and even flow through the coffee I do not press through the HS the more you press at the end the more the potential string of particles can get into your cup pull this up a bit so it stops it we have our cup of coffee it's absolutely fantastic Do not sit there and try to push all of your weight into the air press go nice and slow try that out I like it you may not and that's completely okay try giving your air press a bloom go to the normal way of Brewing it where you have the air press right in the decanter Bloom it for a bit if you're not already doing that and then pour to your target weight I then like to immediately put the plunger in so that no more is dripping out as I like to have that kind of immersion percolation kind of blend and then slowly press through don't go so fine try out some coarser grounds it's not going to give you as much resistance but you're not pushing hard anyway cuz we're trying to maintain the Integrity of the bed we're trying to lessen the amount of those particles that can get through the def Final Cup which can obfuscate your palet make just a much tastier Brew all around give these three tips a try let me know below if it works for you if you want to try out the recipe have at it just remember there are variables that you can control in order to optimize it for your specific coffee if you enjoy what you see please you know hit the like hit the Subscribe check out my patreon down below all of it is super helpful to the channel and to the work that I do here regardless I'm going to enjoy this something tasty and I hope that you grew something tasty today and cheers that's see this one's nice I didn't hold it long enough that's what you're looking at isn't it yes damn it sorry