The good cheap brewer, but expensive. I don’t get it. Help?
this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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The inventor and original owner of the company didn't get it either, AFAIK. He resisted a lot of things that makes aeropress more expensive just for the sake of it. Well he had to cash out sooner or later and this became of it.
Now I might be talking out of my ass, based on half unremembered internet tales.
But here's my own opinion on this: premium aeropress is just for people to showboat they have money.
I would instead pay for big aeropress though. Makes it easier to share coffee.
Oh, I get the business side of it. I don’t get people wanting this, but I guess I’m just not into showboating, like you said.
I know he also didn’t want a bigger one, you’re “supposed to” use the bypass method. Which works really well, in my experience.
...and heavier, and less durable, and again much, much more expensive.
And a grating metal-on-glass sound when putting the cap on.
It’s weird how big of a deal he made about the noise and I barely heard it.
I couldn't hear it in the video, but imagine if you're working with this every day, and hearing the scraping sound and feeling it through your fingers.
I think a big part of the Aeropress's appeal is how satisfying it is in both tactile and audio senses.
When you twist tight the cap on a AP classic, it feels satisfyingly tight, and you instinctively know that it's sealed.
Which reminds me that James briefly commented on how hot the metal cap was after brewing.
Another un-satisfying thing about the AP Premium.
That's James for you though. He places a lot of value on the "feel" of materials and tools.
22min of Hoff is a lot of Hoff!
Is there a TLDR? I'm going to guess something about the thermal properties he doesn't like? This guy is obsessed with temperature.
Don't get me wrong, there's something to it for sure, but I think he overplays the thermal properties of things a bit.
Hmm let me try from memory:
- it is metal and glass.
- The metal base (quite heavy) makes a squealing sound against the glass portion when installing it. Some (like Hoffman) find it unpleasant; others find that the tactile experience outweighs the auditory experience, as it is very solid
- it has slightly different dimensions, which make the puck deeper
- slightly higher extraction
- in a 3 way test against XL and OG, he was able to identify the three brewers correctly and overall preferred the Premium, though that may just be a result of a careless brew
- the amount of microplastics one will ingest from an Aeropress is probably not significant compared to other sources, and the Aeropress microplastics aren’t identified as immediately harmful (i.e. BPA free)
- it’s kinda an expensive way to make the same coffee and trades a lot of the original Aeropress benefits (price, portability, durability) for a luxury feel. It’s glass; you won’t want to toss it in your bag like the OG.
Thx!! yeah I like glass stuff but aeropress is a nice travel brewer. Seems a shame to eliminate that feature. As for the plastic ingestion stuff. Probably good to cut down where you can with disposables etc but having worked in food service, man it's unavoidable. The majority of food you buy or consume has already come into contact with plastic. Can't believe he didn't give it a hard time for being a bigger heat-sink than the plastic one!
I forgot that part. He did a graph. After about 3 min the OG is colder than the new one. Not a major difference at start, 3°C but doesn’t seem to make enough difference in the brew.
James didn't like the metal-on-glass grating sound when tightening the cap either.
He’s like r/coffee or r/espresso the person
I do recognize that my classic plastic Aeropress loses a lot of temperature in its brewing process, and that is what got me started on pre-warming my mug.
I don't like a lukewarm cup of coffee. About 160F at serving time is good for me.
We really could do with a proper way to investigate the microplastic impact of the normal Aeropress. I know testing in microwaves with plastic containers should ridiculously higher plastic count compared to just cold storage and this is a big part of the problem with the Aeropress, it gets hot and that frees a lot more plastic in other tests. Would be nice to know how much of my brain is turned to plastic because of Aeropress brews over the years!
There is an upper limit, though. You can only remove so much plastic from an Aeropress before it becomes unusable.
I guess you could buy a new one and compare the weights.