AeroPress Recipes: Standard, Strong, and Concentrate

The AeroPress is the most forgiving brewer ever made and the most argued-about. It survives being packed in a rucksack, it produces a clean cup with a cheap grinder, and it has generated more competing recipes than any other piece of coffee equipment on earth. Here are three that cover almost everything you would want from it, with grams and seconds attached.

Before you start: the three settings that matter

Grind

Medium-fine — finer than drip, coarser than espresso, roughly the texture of table salt. The AeroPress is unusually tolerant here because the press does part of the work, but if you are grinding for the concentrate recipe go a step finer, and for the standard recipe do not stray coarser than a drip grind or the cup goes thin. Where that sits on your grinder is in our coffee grind size chart.

Water temperature

200°F (93°C) is a good default. Stay in the 195–205°F (91–96°C) window: hotter for light roasts, cooler for dark. Off the boil, 30–45 seconds of waiting lands you roughly in range without a thermometer.

Ratio

The AeroPress is happy anywhere from about 1:16 down to 1:5, which is why it has so many recipes. Standard is 1:16, strong is around 1:13, and concentrate is 1:5. The full conversion table for every method is in our coffee-to-water ratio guide.

Recipe 1: Standard AeroPress (1:16)

A clean, balanced 8 oz cup. This is the recipe to learn first and the one to return to when a fancier method disappoints you.

1. Insert a paper filter in the cap, rinse it with hot water, and warm the chamber. Assemble the AeroPress in the standard orientation — cap down, sitting on your mug.
2. Weigh 15 g of medium-fine coffee into the chamber. Level the bed with a tap.
3. Add 30 g of 200°F water and start a timer. Stir once. This is the bloom — more on why it matters in our guide to the coffee bloom.
4. At 0:30, pour to 240 g total. Stir twice, gently.
5. Insert the plunger about a centimetre to create a seal. This stops the brew dripping through while it steeps.
6. At 1:30, press with steady, even pressure for about 30 seconds. Stop the moment you hear the hiss of air — pressing past that point pushes bitter liquid out of the puck.

Total brew time: about 2 minutes. If the press feels like a leg day at the gym, your grind is too fine; if the plunger drops with no resistance at all, it is too coarse.

Recipe 2: Strong AeroPress (1:13)

Fuller body, longer finish, and it survives a splash of milk. Note what changes: more coffee, not less water. Cutting water while keeping the dose just over-extracts the same grounds, which is bitterness rather than strength — the full argument is in our guide to strong coffee.

1. Set up inverted: plunger inserted about 2 cm into the chamber, the whole thing standing on the plunger with the open end up. Rinse the filter and seat it in the cap, but leave the cap off for now.
2. Weigh in 18 g of coffee, ground one notch finer than the standard recipe.
3. Add 40 g of 200°F water, start the timer, and stir to break up any dry clumps. Wait 30 seconds.
4. Pour to 230 g total. Screw on the cap.
5. At 1:45, give the whole brewer a gentle swirl to drop the grounds suspended near the surface.
6. At 2:00, flip it onto your mug — firmly, with a hand over the cap — and press for 30 seconds.

If you want it stronger still, go to 20 g in the same 230 g of water rather than reducing the water. Past roughly 1:10 the chamber runs out of room and the press gets unpleasant.

Recipe 3: AeroPress concentrate (1:5)

A small, intense shot to dilute with hot water for an Americano-style cup, or to pour over ice and milk. This is the recipe people mean when they say the AeroPress "makes espresso." It does not — see below — but it makes something genuinely useful.

1. Set up inverted, as in Recipe 2. Grind fine — finer than the strong recipe, but not so fine that you cannot press it.
2. Weigh in 25 g of coffee.
3. Add 50 g of 200°F water, stir well, and wait 30 seconds. With this much coffee in the chamber, stirring is not optional.
4. Pour to 125 g total. Cap it.
5. At 1:30, flip and press slowly — 40 to 60 seconds. The resistance is much higher here. Slow and steady; do not lean on it.
6. You will get roughly 80–90 g of concentrate, some water having stayed in the puck. Dilute 1:1 with hot water for a full cup, or pour over ice and top with milk.

Dilute to taste rather than to a number. Concentrate is a base ingredient, and the whole point is that you decide the final strength in the mug.

The three recipes at a glance

Standard vs. inverted: does it matter?

Less than the internet suggests, but it is not nothing.

Standard orientation

Cap on, sitting on the mug, brewing right way up. Safer — there is no hot flip — and quicker to set up. The trade-off is that a little liquid drips through the filter while you steep, so a small amount of your brew gets less contact time than you intended. Inserting the plunger a centimetre to make an airtight seal mostly solves it.

Inverted orientation

Assembled upside down so nothing can drip out until you flip it. You get complete control over steep time, which is why it dominates longer-steep and concentrate recipes. The cost is the flip: a chamber of near-boiling water balanced on a plunger, over a sink, with a hand pressed over the cap. Thousands of people do it daily without incident, and a few do not.

Why the AeroPress is not an espresso machine

Espresso is defined by pressure: roughly 9 bars, forcing about 36 g of liquid out of an 18 g dose in 25–30 seconds. A human arm on a plunger generates a small fraction of that, which is why AeroPress concentrate has no real crema and a different texture entirely. It is a very good strong immersion brew. If you want actual espresso, our espresso at home guide covers what that requires.

Troubleshooting

• Sour or thin — under-extracted. Grind finer, steep 30 seconds longer, or check your water temperature.
• Bitter or drying — over-extracted. Grind coarser, shorten the steep, and stop pressing once you hear air. Full diagnosis in our guide to coffee extraction.
• Impossible to press — grind too fine, or too much coffee for the water. Back off one notch.
• Plunger falls through — grind too coarse, or the filter is not seated properly.
• Gritty cup — fines from a blade grinder. The paper filter catches most sediment; it cannot fix an uneven grind.

Frequently asked questions

Best Bean Reaper Coffee for AeroPress

The AeroPress’s paper filter and short steep flatter bright, complex coffees, so reach for the lighter end of the lineup. Wake The Dead, our light-medium Colombia single origin, is the first pick — cherry, plum, and cane-sugar notes come through with unusual clarity in the Standard 1:16 recipe. Last Call, a bright light roast blend of Ethiopian, Mexican, and Brazilian beans, rewards the same treatment with citrus and fresh fruit.

Brewing the Strong 1:13 recipe or adding milk? Grave Shift, our signature medium roast, keeps its toffee-and-chocolate backbone at full strength.

The AeroPress rewards good beans more than good technique. Bone Yard light roasts are the most interesting thing you can put through one — $21.99 a bag, roasted to order, whole bean or ground.