Fellow Aiden Drip Coffee Maker Review: As Close to Pour-Over as It Gets | Bon Appétit

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This story has been updated with information from more than a month of at-home testing.

I’ve brewed pour-over coffee almost every morning that I’ve spent at home for more than a decade. I’m not one of those people who insists that the routine is a calming moment of zen before a busy day. Often (quite often, with five- and two-year-olds who wake up 15 minutes earlier than I do, no matter what time I wake up) I find it cumbersome and more time consuming than I’d like. But pour-over coffee just tastes so much better when I compare it to all the easier coffee-making methods that exist. Now, though, Fellow’s brand-new Aiden Brewer might be the thing that finally lures me back to the world of convenient coffee.

Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee Maker

Fellow

Amazon

Williams Sonoma

Over the almost-four years that I’ve been testing coffee and espresso makers for Epicurious and Bon Appétit, I’ve used quite a few pieces of equipment that claim to approximate a carafe of pour-over. Some of them make good—even very good—coffee, leaning on different features that mimic the classic pour-over setup. The Ratio 6, for example, models its showerhead after the way water is distributed in the pour-over process. The Café Specialty series allows you to adjust water temperature. But Fellow’s new brewer gets the closest of anything I’ve tried.

Fellow is best known for beautiful products that actually do make pour-over coffee: its gooseneck kettle, its burr grinders, its pour-over set. But the Aiden Brewer is the brand’s first electric coffee maker of any kind, and after using it for more than a month I think it’s one of the best things they’ve put out.

The key to the Aiden is its customizability. You can adjust both the water temperature and the length of the water bursts from the showerhead (think of them as the pours from a kettle when make pour-over). Those two variables are the ways you can adjust the flavor of the coffee. The Aiden comes pre-programmed with suggestions for what parameters to use. For example, medium roast coffee blooms and brews at 205℉, dark roast coffee blooms at 210℉ and brews at 185℉. And lest you think those tweaks are all smoke and mirrors, I brewed pots using the same beans but different settings and it resulted in notably different tastes. Darker beans brewed with hotter water came out bitter and even burnt. With the cooler water recommended on the dark roast settings it was robust, even bordering on smooth. Besides the temperature and water flow, you can also brew anywhere from a single cup (straight into a travel mug) up to a full 10 cup carafe in half cup increments.

The Aiden on its maiden voyage in the Bon Appétit test kitchen.

Those brewing features are really designed for people who want to futz endlessly (which they can do with this brewer), and have firm beliefs about the ways the brewing process for beans from a particular region of Ethiopia needs to differ from the process for beans from a particular region of Honduras. But the rest of the design is really for folks who don’t want to think so much about drip coffee. The whole machine operates using a single dial and button that navigates an entirely self-explanatory interface. The readout also tells you exactly how much coffee to use in both grams, my preferred measure, and tablespoons to hit the coffee-to-water ratio recommended by the Specialty Coffee Association. You can avoid all the extras if you like and use it like a really basic push-to-brew machine with Instant Brew feature. That just brews with however much water is in the removable tank. It’s not my favorite offering from the Aiden—if you don’t take the time to accurately measure both your water and coffee ahead of time you get a watery mess that I think defeats the purpose of having a fancy machine like this in the first place—but it is simple. Fellow founder Jake Miller told me he wanted to make a machine that worked just as well for his mom as it did for a coffee obsessive. I got the impression that his mom is very much like mine: She wants to drink good coffee but is not interested in details like water temperature or flow rate (for the record, my mother uses this super automatic espresso machine and loves it). To that end he made all the basic functions of the Aiden so easy to find and use that I’m not sure you even need to read the instruction manual before using it for the first time (I didn’t and had no issues).

I also spent time with the Aiden’s cold brew feature. There are a lot of coffee makers that make claims about making “flash cold brew” in just a few minutes. Here’s the thing about that: You can’t really do it. What those machines do is tinker around the edges of the water and brewing pressure and the results coffee that still comes out around 150℉ and doesn’t have the easy-drinking character I think of when I think of cold brew. The Aiden actually uses room temperature water (after a hot water bloom cycle) that it drips slowly over the course of several hours. The easiest way to use the cold brew feature is to use the timer before you go to bed, which you can set to have the coffee ready at a specific time. Do note that the coffee will not actually be cold, it will be room temperature and need an ice cube to chill it down.

There is very little not to like about this machine. Switching between the large brew basket, used for 4 cups or more, and the small brew basket, used for 3.5 cups or less, is a slightly annoying process that involves not just swapping the brew basket, but turning a plastic dial on the lid. For such a techy machine it feels very analog. That's a small nit to pick though.

I’ve tested enough kitchen tools and seen enough of them run into issues eventually that I will never call any appliance “perfect,” but after more than a month drinking coffee from the Aiden every morning and using every feature it has I feel confident saying that it will make your morning coffee routine better and easier, whether you’re a coffee nerd or a coffee noob.