Coffee Chat with Jay from AeroPrecipe

A few months ago, in search of a new Aeropress recipe, I came across AeroPrecipe, a directory of curated Aeropress recipes from baristas, enthusiasts, and Aeropress Championship participants. This site illuminates the creativity in the Aeropress community. One recipe even uses a piece of fruit as a filter.

I started messaging the co-creator of AeroPrecipe, Jay, on Instagram, and we got talking about the project. I moved our conversation over to an email where Jay kindly answered a few of my questions about the AeroPrecipe site. Our conversation is below.

For my readers, could you tell me a bit about yourself and what AeroPrecipe is?

My name is Jay and I run AeroPrecipe.com with my wife, Rina. I’m from Australia and Rina is from China. We work online and have been travelling full time for about 7 years, hence our love for the AeroPress, which has over time become our favourite travel accessory having been put to work in hundreds of hotel rooms and Airbnb’s around the world... and it’s still going strong!

AeroPrecipe.com, in its simplest terms, is a glorified collection of AeroPress recipes. It’s just a good spot to find inspiration for making your morning coffee, with the recipes all in once place, including a few filters to help refine the recipe you are looking for.

Why did you decide to start a site that aggregates Aeropress recipes?

I was spending a lot of time hunting around for new recipes online - I had too many links and bookmarks and I kept thinking “wouldn’t it be great if there was a website that had all these recipes in one place and helped me sort by amount of coffee, water temperature etc.” Of course it took me another couple of years to get around to building it!

Can you tell me a bit about how you first got started? Did you focus on community-curated recipes or the ones already written online?

Initially, I collected as many recipes as I could find online, and reached out to the owners for permission to put them on aeroprecipe.com. The community-curated aspect was an afterthought, though I’m glad we added this as it is now where most of the new recipes come from.

You have filters on your site that let people find a recipe based on different variables (i.e. standard versus inverted, paper versus metal filter). Why did you decide to add these filters onto your site?

Just to make it easier to find the right recipe - maybe you want a cold brew recipe but only have 15 grams of beans and a metal filter, for instance. Also, originally there was a lot of championship recipes that generally use a lot of coffee so we wanted to make it easy to find recipes that required fewer beans.

You have 110 recipes on the site so far. What advice would you have for someone who is new to the Aeropress and is struggling to pick a recipe?

Start with a simple recipe, a good example is Tim Wendelboe’s recipe (or any recipe that is used in a cafe, these are usually a safe bet), and one that doesn’t require a lot of equipment. Then simply tweak the variables until you are happy with the taste. It might not taste great the first time, but make minor adjustments to grind size or water temperature until you are happy with it. This should give you a good grounding for experimenting with other recipes.

How do you review recipes for the site? What is the most unique submission you have received so far?

I test each recipe twice every day for a week before it gets published to the site… only joking - we aren’t too strict with submissions - as long as it makes sense and is not too similar to something that already exists.

There are a few unique recipes in our experimental category, but two that spring to mind are:

‘Uncle wolfies cocopresso’ - this one always makes me laugh - it requires you to bloom your coffee in a shot of espresso and then steep it in coconut water. I’ve only tried it once - it certainly packed a punch.

Another interesting one is Cheffe’s ‘double the AeroPress, double the fun’ which uses two AeroPress, filtering one into another, kind of like a leaning tower of AeroPress’s. I have never tried this one though.

Do you have any plans to add new features to the site?

Yes! I’ve half-built a few new features such as a countdown timer with steps for each recipe, and a way for users to create and save their own collections of favourite recipes - we’ll launch these features one day haha.

How do you usually brew with an Aeropress?

My current go-to recipe is 13g that makes me happy. I usually up the dose to 15g, it’s been working well with the beans we have at the moment. And it does make me happy.

Have you ever attended an Aeropress championship?

I haven’t! I don’t have the confidence to compete but I’d love to attend as a spectator. I’ve met with Tim from the WAC a couple of times, and he makes it sound like a very entertaining event.

What is your favourite snack to have with a coffee, if any?

A croissant. Good coffee and a good croissant puts a smile on my face any day of the week :)

You can see the recipes on AeroPrecipe at aeroprecipe.com. You can also keep up to date with AeroPrecipe on their Instagram page @aeropress_recipe.