This is a simple appreciation post for the AeroPress coffee maker. If I want to make a single cup of coffee and I want it to be as good as possible, I’ll reach for the AeroPress every time.

For some people, that’s enough to win the argument already: best coffee equals best coffee maker. But that’s not enough for me. See, there are many other ways to make coffee that are good, but they’re quite expensive. Not the AeroPress. The AeroPress currently retails for $39, making it cheaper than basically every other “coffee maker” out there.

But surely there’s a catch, right? Maybe the filters are expensive? Nah! The filters cost me about 2¢ per filter, and even using it most days means I only need to restock every 3 years at this rate.

Oh, it’s cheap, but maybe that low price means it’s hard to get? Nope, it’s sold at a bunch of retail locations, and is readily available from Amazon for same-day delivery.

Maybe it’s fragile and you need to buy a new one more often? Again, nope, it’s very sturdy and lasts forever. I bought mine about 11 years ago and I don’t see why I’d ever need to replace it.

Is it messy to use? It seems like a French press and those are kinda messy. Nope, not only is it cleaner than my other methods of making coffee, it actually makes less of a mess than any other way I have of making coffee. When you’re done using it, you simply unscrew the bottom piece, pop out the puck of grounds into the trash, and quickly rinse off the bottom of the plunger. The inside of the press is perfectly clean as the plunger pushes everything through perfectly. I toss it in the dishwasher every now and then for good measure, but it’s truly no fuss. Add in the tiny, biodegradable filter and you’ve also got a solution that produces very little waste which is good for the environment.

There are only two downsides I can think of for the AeroPress. One is the volume of coffee it can make; it really does just make one cup of coffee, which is a real limit. If you have people over, you have multiple coffee drinkers in the house, or you drink a few cups of coffee yourself, it’s not going to be the best coffee maker all the time. There’s an XL model that makes twice as much, so that’s maybe an option, but it’s certainly not enough if you need 10 cups for a group or something like that.

The other possible downside is that the AeroPress requires you to press firmly down on the plunger to push the coffee through the grounds and the filter into your cup. There are people who can’t do that, and they’d be better served by something that doesn’t require any physical force being applied.

But yeah, the AeroPress is absolutely amazing and it’s one of the few products I can look at and know pretty confidently that I’ll be using it for the rest of my life.