I'm also a coffee expert in that I drink a shit ton of it and this is my vote.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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I'm on team french press.
My little 4 cup drip coffee maker does this without me having to hold the filter.
And it makes subpar coffee.
Too much technique for my mornings. Aeropress is my preferred method.
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.
Does it truly make that big of a difference? I always feel like if you want a good coffee use really good coffee. When i was semi into trying different coffees i felt this was the only thing that really mattered. Tasted just as great out of my standard coffee pot as it did to a french press.
it does make a difference. it must not make one to you.
everyone has different preferences. i don't like french press or autodrip. i like pour over or vacuum.
a better brew method can make less good coffee better, and a crappy one can make good coffee gross.
water also matters a lot.
The thing about coffee is that it can always taste better. I'm not dunking on coffee. I love coffee, and I love striving for an even better tasting cup.
Water quality absolutely makes a difference as well. Where I live it's fairly hard and quite chlorinated, so I use a filter jug to take that away. Doesn't do much about the hardness, but at least I don't smell swimming pools whilst sipping
The most important thing is to buy whole beans and grind them right before use. All of the flavor compounds will be fresh.
Yeah, i had a semi decent low grade grinder. Didnt spend much on it but it allowed me to control corse to fine grind and worked great. I liked being able to try all the different grinds to find what i liked best. I ended up finding 2 coffees i really liked, but they were expensive and i kind of gave up drinking coffee due to that and some other reasons. This was like 10 years ago, i really don't wanna know what it cost these days!
Bad coffee will always taste bad, but your experience of good coffee can be ruined by brewing it bad. I think coffee pros most of all want high control and small batches, and pour-over is perfect for that.
Brew method is about control and experimentation. Not a big difference, but cheap, easy and controllable. V60 is basically BIFL.
Beans>roast>grind>brew>water
Oh I think roast is primary. Too dark or light ruins any beans. I'd rather have well roasted ordinary beans than fancy beans badly over or under roasted. I'd rather have no coffee frankly, in some cases.
Respectfully disagree. Beans are everything. Shitty beans and you have no where to go but shitty dark roast for shitty coffee. Good beans, and you can go to amazing places depending on the roast or shitty dark roast for shitty coffee.
I like my Chemex pourover and bought it as someone with literally zero coffee-making experience tucks away when not in use and has no nasty plastic or electronic parts to break down over time. Never got into the science stuff, I just pour hot water over grounds and coffee comes out :)
I'd certainly tell someone not to be scared by all the options and accessories people try to sell you online, it really is very simple
I just pour hot water over grounds and coffee comes out
I personally can't be bothered with scales and timers, and you personally developed a feel for the right ratio by now; but just as a reminder to people new to making coffee: the amount of water in relation to the amount of coffee and the time the grounds are in contact with that water does matter A LOT.
This is true. I didn't mean to imply that you should just start vibe brewing, but that it's pretty easy to do it right with little trial and error.
I should maybe elaborate that all I did was read the "instructions" that came with the Chemex. 1tbsp of medium ground per cup of coffee. Boil water in an electric kettle, let it sit for a minute and pour a splash on the grounds to bloom them. Wait ~30 seconds (this is when I'm usually loading up my toaster). Start pouring the hot water. Coincidentally, the top part of the neck is the exact capacity of my mug so I need only one pass to make a cup, so that's nice.
I do this for a different reason than taste. I didn't like the idea of boiling water pouring over plastic and into my cup every morning. I get enough microplastic from the hotel room keys that I eat, I don't need more.
Got myself a stainless steel permanent filter funnel, and an all metal inside electric kettle.
If you're not using a mass spec to actually measure things you're not a pro, just a very expensive opinionated cunt.