If the aesthetics of tea brewing is paramount for you, you should feel free to avoid using this device made of plastic, silicone, and stainless steel. You might want to stop reading right now.
You might say that gongfu is all about controlling extraction.
It’s quite common for gongfu tea brewers to think about leaf-water ratio, water temperature, and steep duration.
But for quite a while I’ve been thinking about two other factors:
I once investigated those two factors, especially the first, by recording for various genres of tea how much water they take up over multiple steeps. But if controlling extraction is the goal, that article just helps delineate the problem rather than pointing at a solution.
What I’m contending here is that by using an Aeropress, squeezing the brewed leaves with the plunger, you can significantly reduce the mass of wet leaves at the end of each steep and thereby come closer to completely stopping extraction at that moment, giving you more control what happens during the next steep.
For those who don’t know — and why should a tea fanatic know? — the Aeropress is a device designed for brewing coffee. It consists of a hollow cylindrical brewing chamber that’s open at both ends. One end has a fitting allowing a filter cap to be screwed firmly in place. In so-called normal position, the filter cap is at the bottom of the chamber containing the coffee-and-hot-water mixture, and the filter cap (usually fortified by a paper filter) resists the fluid from dropping rapidly down into the cup or beaker which the device rests upon. The third part of the Aeropress is a plunger whose business end is made of silicone. The plunger comes into play when the coffee in the brewing chamber has extracted long enough; you push down on the plunger to force all the liquid (but none of the grounds) down into the cup.
I use a standard polyethylene Aeropress. I don’t use the extra large size, of course: the normal size one is bigger than I’d want. I don’t use the fancy glass one because the thought of the glass breaking under pressure while full of hot tea soup scares me.
I brew tea in the Aeropress in so-called inverted mode, that is to say, with the plunger on the bottom. The reason for that is so minimize the height of the air column above the brewing tea. (I realize that air is to some extent an insulator, but obviously less air is better than more air.)
I don’t use the filter cap you get for free with the Aeropress, which leaks heat upward while brewing and tends to leak soup when you flip the whole apparatus to decant the soup. Instead, I use the Prismo filter cap made by the hipster coffee gear company Fellow, which seals the brewing chamber tightly and only allows the soup out under pressure. (From here on, unless I specify otherwise, when I say “Aeropress", I’m talking about Aeropress with Prismo.)I should note that the Prismo makes it possible to brew tea without inverting the device, but as I said above, I prefer the compact brewing chamber that inverted mode allows. (Since I bought the Prismo, Aeropress has released a Prismo knockoff called the Flow Control Filter; I haven’t tried it.) I also don’t use paper filters, which would absorb some of the tea goodness we try to extract.
When I brewed 5g of Dian lü in a gaiwan and drained the leaves thoroughly, the brewed leaves weighed 23.5g. Brewed in an inverted Aeropress/Prismo, the spent leaves weighed 18.5g, which is more than 20% less and coincidentally lighter by exactly the dry weight of the leaves. (Using the Aeropress with the “normal" filter cap, you give up 2g of the Aeropress/Prismo advantage.)
So, in theory, shedding excess hot water from the brewed leaves should give you more control over brewing the next steep, because you have halted extraction more completely and because the next steep’s kettle water won’t have as much leaf weight to contend with. Does it really give you more control?
My evidence for better extraction halting is from brewing some Lu’an heicha that I’ve always found troublesome. I find that, brewing the tea in a gaiwan, steeps after the first tend to get harshly astringent to the extent that I can’t enjoy the tea’s good qualities. But this problem vanishes with the Aeropress.
I don’t have empirical evidence to show that nth steep
brewing temperature in an Aeropress would be closer to kettle
temperature (i.e. hotter) than in a gaiwan; I don’t have the ability
to measure temperature inside either vessel, and temperature after
decanting is beside the point. I can say that, as I do the math, you
would expect the Aeropress soup to be a few degrees Celsius
hotter. Let’s say you start with 5g of leaves which eventually
swells to 23.5g in a gaiwan and 18.5g in an Aeropress. Say the
leaves cool off to room temperature = 20℃. Then, if the kettle
temperature is 100℃ and you use 100ml of boiling water, then the
gaiwan brewing temp should be (100 * 100 + 23.5 * 20) / (100 +
23.5) ≅ 84.8. The Aeropress temp should be (100 * 100
+ 18.5 * 20) / (100 + 18.5) ≅ 87.5.
You might think you’re damaging the leaves by subjecting them to plunger squeezing. But no, in my experience the leaves bounce back, rapidly gaining volume (but not weight!) to resemble fresh leaves more with each successive steep. You can see it in the above photo of Aeropress-brewed Dian lü leaves after five steeps.
I’ve done this with many genres of tea, and in no case have I seen (or tasted!) evidence of leaf damage due to squeezing. I could imagine trouble arising when you squeeze the fragile leaves of fukamushi (deep steamed) sencha, but I don’t have any on hand to try.
In my opinion — please let me know if you think I’m wrong! — I’ve given you reason to believe using an Aeropress for gongfu tea brewing increases your control, and I’ve also given you reason to doubt it harms the tea leaves the way you might fear. So why not give it a try?
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First published: Nov 6, 2025
Latest revision: Nov 7, 2025