AeroPress

AeroPress, Inc. started as a sporting goods company. Alan Adler, an engineer who taught a course on sensors at Stanford, founded Superflight in 1984 to make his Aerobie flying ring, which set a Guinness record for the farthest thrown object at 406 metres. The company was renamed Aerobie, Inc. in 2005, after the product most people knew it by.

The coffee maker came out of Adler’s own frustration with brewing a single good cup at home. He started work on it in 2003 in his garage in Palo Alto, went through more than thirty prototypes over two years, and introduced the AeroPress at Coffee Fest Seattle in November 2005. The design has hardly changed since. The plastic has: the company moved away from polycarbonate in 2009 over concerns about BPA, and the Original has been made of polypropylene since 2014.

Two things then happened that the company did not plan. In 2008 Tim Wendelboe and Tim Varney held the first World AeroPress Championship at Wendelboe’s roastery in Oslo, with three competitors. It is still organised by fans, and the 2023 edition drew more than 5,000 competitors across 178 national and regional events. And in summer 2021 the company was acquired by Tiny Ltd, after which the range widened quickly: a stainless steel filter in 2022, the Clear and the XL in 2023, the Go Plus travel set and the glass and metal Premium in 2024, and a Clear XL in 2025.

What they are good at. One idea, executed cheaply and well. The Original is an immersion brewer with a plunger, which makes it forgiving of a grind that is slightly off and easy to clean, and it is light and hard to break.

What to know before buying. The newer models are variations on the same chamber. The Clear changes the plastic, the XL doubles the volume, the Go Plus adds a tumbler. None of them changes how the coffee is brewed, so the Original is still the one to start with. The marketing calls the concentrate “espresso-style”; it is a strong coffee, not espresso.

Who it suits. One person brewing one mug, at home, at work or away from home. The AeroPress method page covers the technique, and the AeroPress Original first look covers what the specification promises.