this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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I'm not surprised, a V60 and a good pouring kettle is absolutely the best method in terms of balancing quick brew, ease of use/maintenance/minimal cleaning and good tasting coffee.
Plus it's super cheap, the only really pricey thing you'd need to invest in is a grinder (or just buy high quality pre ground coffee in small batches).
Aeropress, and skip the posh kettle. It can give you consistently solid results with fairly minimal cleaning.
You also get a satisfying thwak when you push the ground out of the piston, which I'm surprised they haven't used in since marketing video tbh.
I use an ode portafilter and metal mesh instead of paper on mine, but some people think the extra solids are too much.
Team Aeropress reporting in.
I think it was originally built for camping but I got it for when I travel to remote places without a good coffee shop nearby.
It's like a cleaner version of a coffee press. Very satisfying to pop out the puck of grounds.
Never pre-ground if you care about taste.
Hoffman was surprised to find that it only took 24 hours before his high end coffee tasted inferior to fresh ground ordinary beans. (Unless I'm misremembering details but that was the gist).
A decent hand grinder still works on a budget. It's easy to get the grind done while the water heats. Also a great thing for travel and camping.
I watched that video recently and the conclusions were actually the opposite of that: James preferred the week-old coffee from the really good grinder over the freshly ground coffee from the cheap grinder. The testing carried out on "regular people" also didn't show a statistically significant preference for freshly ground in this scenario.
The conclusion is pretty much: if you don't have a good grinder, you're probably better off buying really quality pre-ground coffee. At least if you can buy it in small enough batches. Obviously if you buy a huge bag and take over a month to use it up then yeah, it will be stale eventually.