I’ve been using James Hoffman’s recipe since I bought AeroPress, and I was pretty satisfied. While being simple, it produced rich, balanced cups of coffee for both light and medium roasts. I was happy with it. But then I started noticing that some light-roasted coffee was too bitter. It rarely happened, but when it did, it wasn’t possible to get rid of that excessive bitterness. When I tried to increase the grind size, I got watery, but still too bitter coffee. At first, I thought there was something wrong with the coffee beans, but then I thought, maybe immersion brewing was just not suitable for them. So, I decided to find another recipe.
I wanted to try a hybrid recipe containing a percolation phase, as I believed it could produce more balanced cups. So I searched on the Aeromatic app and found a recipe from The Real Sprometheus. It has a long percolation phase and quite a short immersion phase. And this recipe fixed my coffee. I got a balanced cup without excessive bitterness and with more detailed acidity. Now, this is my recipe to go, as I think it’s superior to James Hoffman’s recipe.
Yeah, Hoffman is great, but he’s not some infallible authority on every brewing method, though people treat him like one. In his video on specialty moka pots, he covers the Bialetti Brikka, the only moka pot that produces crema. He ignores all the very specific instructions that come with the Brikka, like use only 280 mls of water and don’t pre-heat it, then uses a random base rather than the special-sized base that comes with it, and fails to get it to produce crema. I still see coffee snobs claim that the Brikka doesn’t work because of that video.