Coffee requires only two ingredients that can be made at home, but the industry surrounding the world’s favorite drink has been hell-bent on making things as complicated as possible for decades. An endless barrage of attractive gadgets promises to streamline every step of the process, and yet for many consumers, the finished product ends up tasting remarkably similar.
No shade for people who maximize their morning ritual with aesthetically pleasing trinkets like a $2,650 coffee grinder or a $208 electric kettle, but the fact that McDonald’s sells 8 million cups of coffee a day speaks to an inevitable truth: most people simply want to receive coffee into their body with as little effort as possible.
Given the tension between a quality cup and the time and effort spent making it, a coffee machine’s ability to brew delicious coffee with as little friction as possible should be the primary criterion of greatness. The Fellow Aiden drip coffee machine has plenty of esoteric features to please design-minded coffee fanatics, but it also makes really good coffee with minimal hassle. You could replace your dad’s dirty old Mr. Coffee with this beautiful black 9 x 9 x 12 inch cube and he probably wouldn’t complain for more than five minutes, which says a lot about its user-friendly interface and ease of use. .
Photography: Pete Cottell
Keeping it simple
Fellow offers an app to accompany Aiden, but you don’t need it to start brewing. Smart devices have been making their way into kitchens for a decade, with tremendously varied results. Preheating the oven from the supermarket parking lot is very interesting and useful, but do you really need a smart blender? And how much time is really saved in the end when countless hours are wasted troubleshooting smart home connections, checking settings, and downloading clunky apps, many of which ask to track your location and force you to check a box in terms of conditions? -Use a page that includes questionable arbitration clauses? Is all this really necessary for a batch of muffins or a cup of coffee?
One could easily get lost in the weeds when selecting settings like roast type, elevation, or presets for beans from iconic roasters like Onyx and Verve, but it’s just as easy to skip all that and start brewing coffee. To test this theory, I tried making a cup of coffee without reading the manual or connecting to the proprietary app. This took me about eight minutes, which is a remarkable feat considering Aiden’s “intelligence” was a focal point of the pre-release press.
After rinsing the pot and water reservoir, I turned the single black knob to “wake up” the machine and scan its menu on the vibrant LED screen. I selected “Guided Brew,” marked how many ounces of coffee I wanted, inserted the corresponding color-coded brew basket, set the water dial above to match, added the recommended dosage of ground coffee, pressed Start, and that was it. Eight ounces of perfection at 200 degrees Fahrenheit in about three minutes.