Lew Perin (@babelcarp)’s Aeropress thread starting 2025-07-21 01:16:03
A couple of weeks ago when I saw what Don Mei was doing with an Aeropress, I got excited. Not because I wanted to grind tea leaves like coffee beans and make a flat white, but because I thought an Aeropress might be able to help with a gongfu brewing problem.
If the Aeropress’s plunger could squeeze enough liquid out of the brewed leaves to stop extraction without crushing them, then maybe that would help with teas that easily oversteep.
I’ve been experimenting, and I’m cautiously optimistic. In the photo 4g of Dian Hong has been brewed 4 times and the plunger is in all the way. See how with the cap off the leaves expand well over the top of the chamber? That shows how much they had been compressed. And they look intact, don’t they?
2025-07-21 01:16:03 babelcarp
@babelcarp verrry interesting i like where your head's at!
2025-07-21 02:12:48 bea
I have some 25-year-old Lu’an heicha. You might expect a tea that old to have mellowed out, but no, it spent most of its life in dry northern California, kind of the opposite of Hong Kong storage.
So that Lu’an batch for me is a benchmark of harshness danger and overbrewing ease. Which is why I put it into the Aeropress for five steeps today. And no worries: not much bitterness or astringency on any steep.
Let’s not get too excited, though. I haven’t been scrupulously trying to duplicate the temperature or leaf-water ratio I would normally use in a gaiwan. Still, so far I’m encouraged.
The photo shows the Lu’an leaves having bounced back after being squeezed in the third steep.
2025-07-22 01:07:46 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea oh, that's a lovely idea. i should find a mesh filter again for mine.
2025-07-22 01:47:40 cathos
@cathos Right, I wouldn’t use one of the paper filters.
The Aeropress metal filter is pricey for such a weightless thing, but it’s elegant. (I tell myself that!)
2025-07-22 02:04:21 babelcarp
After the third steep, these baozhong leaves really bounced back from Aeropress compression.
The flavor and aroma seem just as good as if I were using a gaiwan. I’m not super happy about using a stolid stoneware mug, but I don’t feel confident about shoving the plunger down when the receptacle is delicate porcelain.
2025-07-23 18:58:19 babelcarp
@babelcarp pre-heat the mug, and then transfer the beverage into a more pleasant vessel after extraction. ...and suddenly the mug doesn't sound that bad anymore 😅
2025-07-23 19:05:50 lasse
@lasse Right, but then there’s the problem of the Aeropress itself: nobody would mistake it for an artisanal object. True, for a ton of money you can buy a glass version, but I don’t think there’s a way around the silicone at the business end of the plunger.
(Silicone is such a wonderful material, I sometimes think it should be granted an exemption from moral and aesthetic disapproval. Something like a papal indulgence, but for things.)
2025-07-23 19:16:05 babelcarp
@babelcarp that's true. Then you'll have to get yourself a Strietman CT2 - that can go as low as 80°C, unlike a La Pavoni. And it certainly looks the part 😎. But is another ton of money, though.
2025-07-23 19:22:17 lasse
@lasse I suspect you’re joking, but in case you aren’t: This isn’t about espresso, rather it’s about steeping leaves in a chamber of hot water till enough extraction has been done, and *only then* squeezing out the intercellular juice in the leaves along with the rest of the tea liquor being decanted at the end of steeps 1, 2, 3. 4, ...
2025-07-23 19:31:11 babelcarp
@babelcarp only half-joking, really. The Aeropress is a repurposed coffee maker, too, in this case. And the Strietman would be able to achieve the same result, I guess. Since I don't own one, I can't test it though.
2025-07-23 19:45:14 lasse
@lasse That said, the Strietman is a thing of beauty. I can think of at least one friend I wouldn’t want to tell about it because he'd definitely jump at it.
2025-07-23 19:35:56 babelcarp
After the fourth steep, the baozhong leaves have bounced back so they’re at least a centimeter over the top or bottom of the Aeropress, depending on your perspective.
2025-07-23 19:59:57 babelcarp
Today in NYC it’s brutally hot. On the sunny side of the street the breeze can be your enemy. When I ran an errand midday I found myself planning my route neglecting distance in favor of shade.
In the Aeropress it’s been Mengding Huang Ya today. Brewed at a low leaf/water ratio, steep after steep it’s shown a nice woody quality that compares decently with my memory of the same tea brewed with strict gongfu at the vendor’s shop ten days ago.
2025-07-29 20:43:47 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea It's brutally hot here in Baltimore today too
My tea of the day is actually an iced blend...very rare for me as I typically don't do blends
I'd poured out a 180ml teapot's worth of brewed Ming Feng mao cha into a glass pitcher, then added room temp water and 12g Hui Long (a Yunnan green, for the unfamiliar). Left it on the counter for a few hours then put it in the fridge. It's very good. The two teas aren't that far apart in flavor, so it's a really subtle blend
2025-07-29 20:56:14 dave_heumann
@dave_heumann Ugh, I’d expect Baltimore to be worse than NYC today!
When you say Hui Long do you mean this?
https://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/babelcarp.cgi?phrase=huilong+cha&define=1
2025-07-29 21:46:18 babelcarp
It's down to 97 after hitting 101 earlier, so yep
That's it. I've never seen anything but green tea made from that cultivar. It's got sort of a sheng-ish flavor, sweet and somewhat astringent. It's gray-green and coiled like bi luo chun
2025-07-29 22:03:44 dave_heumann
@dave_heumann Mmm, sounds great. Yet another example of the vagueness of the distinction between Dian lü and pu'er maocha.
2025-07-29 22:07:12 babelcarp
Here’s something you can do with tea in an Aeropress and almost convince yourself you’re brewing coffee: charge the vessel with hojicha powder and hot water, using a paper filter rather than the stainless steel one. Essentially nothing goes through the filter till you push down on the plunger.
I actually think I prefer the result to what I get by whipping it like real matcha. All the flavor is there and most of the texture, but hardly any of the grit.
It would be interesting to try matcha this way.
2025-08-05 19:10:46 babelcarp
There’s something about making tea in an Aeropress that I’m not happy with: I think it favors softness and low notes to a fault the way some unglazed pots do.
Brewing this tea:
https://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/babelcarp.cgi?phrase=Tongcheng+xiao+lanhua&define=1
in a porcelain gaiwan, I can reliably get a nice sweet corn note that for me defines this particular tea. In the Aeropress that quality is subliminal at best; I just get a pleasant generic soft lücha flavor.
I think I need to get some friends together to do a session doing A/B comparisons on a lot of different teas.
2025-08-05 20:11:41 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea due to the paper filter? Or also with the metal filter?
What about temperature... if you're not pre-heating the ceramics, it might draw away the heat much faster than the plastic 🤔
2025-08-05 20:25:57 lasse
@lasse Making tea in the AeroPress, I normally use the metal filter.
About temperature, using a gaiwan I don’t preheat except for the first steep. And besides, the sensory differences between the Aeropress and gaiwan seem like what you would expect if the gaiwan were hotter. ( I try to match brewing temp between the two vessels.)
2025-08-05 21:39:41 babelcarp
It has occurred to me that if the Aeropress actually does somehow soft-pedal tea's high notes, then the problem might be the plastic that the extraction chamber is made of. So the possibility arises that Aeropress's deluxe mode with a glass chamber might fix this problem.
Trouble is:
- The glass model costs 3-4 times the price of the plastic version.
- Who's to say that the source of the problem is the plastic chamber rather than the silicone plunger seal?
2025-08-06 19:37:49 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea if I brew upright, the water shouldn't touch the plunger / seal (just the steam), which might make a difference. hmmm.
2025-08-06 19:41:36 cathos
@cathos But if you try to brew decent tea in an upright Aeropress, the liquor will drop through the whole leaves and the filter cap before much extraction has occurred.
Brewing coffee, the famous puck that restrains the fluid till you’re ready to push the plunger down is possible only because the coffee is ground to a powder. Not only that, it works much better if you use a paper filter rather than a stainless steel filter; I’m leery of doing that with tea for fear of altering the flavor.
I actually achieved a puck making hojicha in my Aeropress. In my current tea inventory, that’s about it.
2025-08-06 20:20:19 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea hmmm. maybe we need the fellow prismo? or something like that, in a non-reactive material?
now I'm tempted to try brewing tea in my v60 switch and my vacuum syphon with the glass filter.
and I'm reminded that hario makes a glass switch tea brewer.
2025-08-06 22:04:17 cathos
@cathos Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the Hario switch wouldn’t squeeze the leaves at the end of a steep; that ability is the reason I got interested in Aeropress in the first place.
(For all my whining about the Aeropress, I’m totally convinced that the leaf squeezing is a virtue.)
The Fellow prismo should remove the need for the liquor to touch the silicone, but at the expense of it touching…the prismo.🤨
I’m afraid I can’t figure out what a vacuum syphon is.🙃
2025-08-07 01:28:08 babelcarp
@babelcarp oh, you're right! yeah. the hario brewers just use gravity. a vacuum syphon / coffee siphon pulls the brew, and then air through the grounds without compressing them. so... might drain more of the tea and prevent it from sitting in water, but probably won't get much more out of the leaves.
still, prismo might be worth a shot.
2025-08-07 05:22:03 cathos
While I’m lamenting possible Aeropress shortcomings when gongfu brewing tea, here’s one you wouldn’t think of in advance.
After you pour out one steep, before the next steep you need to address the device in inverted position with the cap off. The leaves you just steeped will be at the top of the device, resting on the end of the plunger. Your task is to pull the plunger down or the extraction chamber up, allowing the leaves to sink into the part of the chamber you open up.
But the plunger's silicone seal grips the extraction chamber walls tightly: that’s the Aeropress's sine qua non. You need to pull the plunger out slooowly till the effective volume of the chamber is what you want.
Otherwise--you’ll pull the plunger all the way out and leaves will fly everywhere.
2025-08-06 19:52:42 babelcarp
I have a very good shiliangcha
https://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/babelcarp.cgi?phrase=Shi2+Liang3+Cha2
whose only flaw is its extreme compression. Each time I flake enough for a session, I feel I’m taking my life in my hands. Also, I tend to get a lot of fines and dust amid the "normal" size pieces.
The interesting thing is, when I brewed some of this tea today in my Aeropress, because of the abundance of tiny pieces, the leaves assembled themselves into a ground-coffee-style puck, so when I un-inverted the device to pour off the liquor, it didn’t run out till I pushed down on the piston.
Unfortunately I don’t have any CTC tea in the house--I bet the same thing would happen with it.
2025-08-19 00:15:44 babelcarp
@babelcarp you really got into thist tea aeropress brewing! 😄
@tea
2025-08-19 00:22:40 nomadbynature
@nomadbynature Someone's gotta do it!🦸♂️
2025-08-19 00:46:10 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea But how did it taste? 🤓
2025-08-20 10:47:19 JDennig
@JDennig Very enjoyable. Smooth and soft at the possible sacrifice of some high notes I could get with a gaiwan.
2025-08-20 12:12:13 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea Also, when lacking CTC, one may always try Chong Shi Cha. Shall try next time I have access to a percolator/portafilter device—maybe I‘ll try a moka. 🤔🤭
2025-08-20 10:55:28 JDennig
@JDennig You mean Moka Bialetti?
Hmm, I don’t have any chong shi cha either, and it’s harder to get my hands on it than CTC, which I’d definitely buy if I could find a *small* package in e.g. an Indian grocery store.
2025-08-20 12:16:32 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea Agreed, Chong Shi Cha is quite rare (and delicate). On the other hand, what might one expect in taste to come out of CTC? 😢
2025-08-20 12:19:12 JDennig
@JDennig In general, sure, CTC is dreck. But I remember some remarkably good CTC tea SM Changoiwala made for Spouse and me years ago in a Darjeeling garden, of all places. (Not DJ tea, by the way.)
2025-08-20 15:51:00 babelcarp
Okay, I think I made a breakthrough in my Aeropress gongfu research today.
I’ve mentioned that using the Aeropress inverted so the perforated filter and cap face upward during extraction tends to soften the tea liquor and tamp down high notes in the taste. It occurred to me that the reason for this is heat loss upward.
So today I’m brewing the same shiliangcha as a couple of days ago with a random little plastic bowl on top of the whole apparatus, making it that much more ungainly but trapping more heat inside the brewing chamber. And it works: the liquor tastes as if it came out of a porcelain gaiwan. That’s without sacrificing the whole point of using the Aeropress: stopping extraction between steeps.
2025-08-22 15:54:42 babelcarp
One thing that gripes me about steeping tea in my Aeropress is the near-opacity of the extraction chamber. You need to place the plunger end exactly where you want it in order to determine the volume of hot water you’re steeping with, and it’s really hard to see the boundary between plunger and air behind that dark gray plastic.
In the left-hand photo the plunger ends right in the middle of the ① mark, but can you see it? On the right it’s more visible, but needing to hold the damn thing up to me window is suboptimal.
2025-08-30 21:45:08 babelcarp
I think I'll stick with a teapot 🫖
2025-08-30 21:49:03 happy
@babelcarp @tea sounds to me you're working your way to the premium glass version :)
2025-08-30 21:52:29 baptnz
@baptnz The thought has certainly occurred to me. But the money! Plus, with all the force you need to pull the plunger out between steeps, I worry about the consequences of having a destructible extraction chamber.
2025-08-30 21:58:12 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea True – I wonder if you'll take the plunge
2025-08-30 21:59:22 baptnz
@baptnz If I do, you’ll be the first to know, Dad.
2025-08-30 22:02:36 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea you could make a small kind of "light box" to put up the wall. If you push the Aeropress against it, that'll activate the light via a momentary switch and shine the light trough the 'press at just the right position.
Call it the "Pueropress AimGuard" or something 😅
2025-08-31 07:18:17 lasse
Another thing that bugs me about Aeropress gongfu is that when you reposition the plunger between steeps (which you need to do each time) there’s always the danger you’ll pull the plunger all the way out of the extraction chamber, scattering damp leaves everywhere.
The reason for this is that the silicone plunger tip makes an extremely tight seal with the extraction chamber, so it takes a lot of force to pull the plunger out. So retracting the plunger slowly and precisely takes…concentration.😑
2025-08-30 21:52:32 babelcarp
This is a nice video in which Denny of TeaDB does a bunch of steeps of Xiaguan Love Forever—not that the specific tea matters that much—and measures steep by steep how much liquid the leaves take up. Spoiler alert: they swell to about 4 times their dry weight.
Why do I bring this up in my never-ending Aeropress thread? Because it’s a good data point against which to measure my steeped, then squeezed leaves. I’ll do those measurements before long, I promise.
2025-09-06 00:27:36 babelcarp
Today I tried to see exactly how much liquid gets squeezed out of the leaves when you use an Aeropress.
(I’m now using a Prismo filter and cap from the hipster coffee tech company Fellow rather than the original equipment. It eliminates the need to invert the Aeropress and makes a satisfying hiss when you push the plunger. :awesome: )
I used 5g of Dian lü and steeped it 5 times in the AP. After weighing the leaves, I steeped them one last time in a gaiwan and weighed them again after carefully draining them but *not* squeezing them.
2025-09-06 21:44:34 babelcarp
The 5g of Dian lü leaves swelled to 23.5g in the gaiwan. That’s 4.7 times their original weight of the dry leaves, so this tea seems thirstier than Denny’s Xiaguan LF.
The puck that emerged from the Aeropress weighed 18.5g, or only 3.7 times the leaves’ dry weight.
So the squeezing rid the leaves of 5g of liquid, which happens to be exactly the same as the leaves’ dry weight.
2025-09-06 21:53:13 babelcarp
@babelcarp apparently, the tea group (or any guppe group) isn't working anymore. At least according to this: https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips/115164282623836102
I know you post regularly in the group and I figured i should spread the word somehow...
2025-09-07 19:27:31 evib
Today, for completeness’s sake or something, I went back to the original Aeropress filter and cap. Same setup otherwise, though: 5g Dian lü, 5 steeps.
The puck after 5 steeps was noticeably wetter than with the Prismo filter and cap, and heavier too: 20.4g vs. 18.5g with the Prismo.
So I don’t think I’ll be using the original AP filter and cap anymore; for me the whole point of this exercise is to wring moisture out of the leaves at the end of each steep, so why not do it all the way with the Prismo?
2025-09-08 21:33:03 babelcarp
Famous last words, I know, but I think I’ve found the best way to use Aeropress for gongfu tea brewing: with a Fellow Prismo filter and cap, inverted. I can explain!
• The reason for using Aeropress at all is to stop extraction between steeps as much as possible by squeezing the brewed leaves dry.
• The Prismo improves on the standard AP by squeezing the leaves more thoroughly, and you needn’t invert because the valve keeps the tea liquor in the chamber till you push the plunger down.
So why invert? Because “right side” up gongfu steeping means you have a small amount of tea soup extracting at the bottom of a tall chamber full of air. You’re losing lots of heat. This may be okay for greens but not for teas you need to brew hot.
2025-09-14 00:20:29 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea damn it. i guess it was inevitable that i get my own prismo cap eventually.
2025-09-14 00:27:55 cathos
@cathos Please post your results when you do!
2025-09-14 00:40:01 babelcarp
@babelcarp @tea whaaaatttt 🤯
2025-09-14 00:28:45 YKantRachelRead
With the Prismo in inverted position you get the thermal advantage of the effective brewing chamber (from plunger to filter) being just big enough to fit the soup, without sacrificing the Prismo’s extra leaf squeezing at steep end.
Plus, there’s much less spillage than with the standard Aeropress in inverted position.
But: when tipping over the inverted AP with Prismo to place it over the vessel you’re going to decant into, you have to move slowly. Otherwise there’s the danger of the sudden shift in the weight of the soup causing some of it to spurt through the valve … horizontally, quite likely!
This danger is easy to avoid once you understand it. At this point I can brew five steeps without spilling a drop.💪
2025-09-14 00:37:45 babelcarp