Video Overview | Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee Maker

Transcript

I'm Ryan from prima, and this is the Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee Maker

The Aiden is probably the most exciting innovation in the automatic coffee space in decades, and that's because this coffee maker really is three things in one. First and foremost, Aiden is an auto batch brewer with guided prompts or even simple one touch operation if you like. As well as built in presets optimized for light, medium and dark roasted coffee, respectively, fellow was careful to make the Aiden's UI super friendly to anyone who wants a simple, straightforward experience. You can just fill the reservoir, load your grounds, then hit the quickstart or schedule a brew for the next morning and forget about it. But Aiden is so much more than that. If you want it to be beyond its basic batch brewing capabilities, Aiden is also a cold brew coffee maker and an automatic pour over capable of brewing with doses as low as eight grams and mimicking the manual brewing process in ways never before seen in a home coffee maker.

Next, I want to dig into the features, and then we'll talk about the advanced variable controls in this machine. Let's do it. All right. So first and foremost Aiden is made of plastic. There are some steel parts here and there. But for the most part this is a plastic bodied brewer. The baskets are made of plastic too. All right. So this is a very simple double walled stainless carafe. What I like about it is that it doesn't retain any coffee. There's no lip on the top to catch that last few milliliters like most carafes out there. So you can pour absolutely everything out of it. It's not maybe the most premium feeling carafe. It has a plastic handle, but very functional and built into the lid as a whole. It connects to the bottom of the batch brewer basket. That just eliminates any air space between the basket and the carafe. To keep your coffee hot. Let's take a look at the showerhead. If you lift up this panel here, you have access to the showerhead and the brew basket. What makes this showerhead super cool is that you can choose between a center distribution for a cone brewer, or you can choose a wider distribution for the flat bottom basket. Depending on which basket you choose, you can accommodate it with a proper distribution of water to make sure you're getting that edge to edge distribution and just really optimizing extraction for that brewer.

So let's pull out the cone basket which is currently installed. This is what fellow recommends for anything under 500ml. Great for single cups. They did a lot of testing and decided that cone shaped brewer was the best one for single cups in terms of flavor and extraction. If you do want to brew more than 500ml, or just for a single cup with a flat bottom basket, you can do that. And there are sensors in this machine that know which basket you have installed, which is interesting. Through the guided prompts which we'll get into in just a second, it'll say, hey, you need to change that basket because your batch size is over 500ml. Or if it's less, it'll tell you, hey, use the cone basket, which is is pretty cool. Put it back into place. It's got a really satisfying snap. Great fit. There's also a bypass valve on the top of these baskets. So just in case you do overflow, you grind to fine that water is going to be able to escape bypass down into the holes built into the top of this lid just to prevent any overflow and mess.

Inside of the Aiden is a water pump and not a traditional thermo siphon heating system with a traditional brewer, like a Technivorm, it's using water pressure from the temperature to force water up a tube and then eventually out the showerhead. And that just creates an inconsistent flow rate throughout the brew. And also inconsistent temperatures where the temperature kind of starts really low and gets super high by the end of the brew. With a pump, it's not only super quiet, but that flow rate stays consistent for every single pulse frequency. It's starting with cold water, moving it through a flash heating system to give you a precise flow rate and a precise temperature for every cycle.

Next, the reservoir. This is removable, which is great. You can take it to the sink with you. It has volumetric reference points for milliliters as well as cups. Pretty simple. And then it snaps back into place. Last thing I'm going to mention externally is the click wheel. If you're familiar with the Fellow EKG same exact control. Just one button. It clicks side to side and then also inwards to make your menu selections.

All right so that's it for features. Come up close with me and we'll check out this UI. All right. So we're here in sleep mode. If I press the click wheel we'll enter the menu. All right. So I'm going to start from the top. Instant brew is for anyone who wants a one touch experience. Just like a classic batch brewer. Press this button. It's going to brew the water that's in the reservoir until it's gone. Or you can assign in the advanced menu one of your guided brew profiles to this button so that you can launch into that with one touch. I have 300ml inside the reservoir right now. And I'll show you what happens when I press this button. It is going to go ahead and just immediately start the brew here. Now let's say I'm going to cancel this that I have the showerhead set to the flat bottom distribution setting. And I have a single basket in here. And I start this again. It knows through a bunch of sensors that I don't have my showerhead set correctly. So I change the showerhead. It knows also through another sensor that my lid's not closed. So when I close the lid, boom. There's a lot of guidance in here to kind of prevent you from screwing up, which is really great.

And like I said, if you want to assign a specific profile to instant brew, you can come in to the settings, select Instant Brew, click advanced Mode, and then we can select a profile here, enter in our volume as well as our amount of coffee here okay. So let's go back to the main menu. Next let's look at the guided brew. All right. So there are some presets here, light roast medium and dark roast that were set up by Fellow that are just, you know, utilizing the variables at hand like water temperature, pulse frequencies to optimize the brew for these roast levels, which is great. Cold brew is available in this machine. Cold brew is a hot bloom and then utilizes whatever temperature water is in your reservoir. So that hot bloom is going to expedite the extraction. More than a cold, cold brew would. So you're getting it done in about 2 to 3 hours, and you can get really high percentage extraction rates out of that. Below that we have some presets that were input through the Fellow app. This is from the Fellow Drops. Basically it's their subscription program. If you order coffee through their subscription program, those coffees can be, you know, automatically uploaded to the brewer already set with the right parameters to, optimize extraction for those, which is cool. Ryan's brew. That's mine. And I have it set right now for 310ml. So I can change that in increments of ten milliliters. Here I have this set to metric. You can also set it to Imperial if you want it in ounces. You know most of us are measuring if you're doing this precisely measuring water in milliliters. But that means also that it's going to display temperature in Celsius which I don't really like. I kind of wish that you could set the temperature units independently, but it is what it is. If you do set it to Imperial, it's going to show cups in increments of, I believe, half a cup. And then on the bottom you'll see milliliters kind of smaller there as a reference. So first thing it's going to show me my programed water volume.

You'll notice that I'm able to program the input of water for my brew. Which means Aiden is actually volumetric. And that's really exciting. So what you can do with this machine is fill up the reservoir with whatever you want. Might as well just fill it and then program the exact amount to the nearest ten milliliters that you want it to dispense. So once I select, how many milliliters I want my brew to be, it's, it's this is a reminder to put 20g in in the edit section. I've already told it that I want a 1 to 16.5 ratio. So it's calculating the amount of grams of coffee that I need to use based on the volume input that we just programed. So 320 it knows okay, you need 20g. Now if I press the click wheel it's going to begin that brew. All right. And you can see our elapsed time.

All right. So next let's look at editing profiles. And this is where things get really really interesting. So let's go back down to Ryan's brew and look at some of the variable controls available here. So first of all let's talk about ratio. Like I said you can pick within increments of one half 1 to 16.5 is what I usually use. And then you can select cold brew if that's what you want your profile to be. And then there's an advanced menu here that allows us to edit, the bloom cycle as well as frequency pulses. So I'll explain that a little bit more. If we edit the bloom it's enabled, we can set a ratio of how much of our total volume of water will be introduced in that bloom. Okay, I have it set to 1 to 3. So basically that means if we're using 20g, then it's going to give me 60ml of water for our bloom. You can tell the machine we want a 40 second duration. And then we can also set a temperature for that bloom. And that's one of the really cool features about Aiden is every single pulse cycle can be profiled by temperature independently. So you can temperature profile your way all the way to the end of a brew, like up to ten different cycles and independent temperature for each. So next is single serve pulses. And what this means is any brew that's below 500ml is considered single serve. And then anything above 500ml is a batch. So let's go to my single serve. And I can tell this I want three frequency pulses. And then I want 23 seconds between those pulses. And then I can set temperatures for each of those pulses. So a lot to unpack here.

First of all why would you do this? I think the main thing is that pulses allow us to kind of optimize the brew for our given grind, size and dose. We don't want the water level to be too high and bypass through the filter. We also don't want the water level to be too low and kind of dig holes in our grounds. This is helping you kind of maintain the right level of water, maybe half an inch above the ground. So that we're not under or overfilling that basket, which is cool. It's also giving you an opportunity to drain and reintroduce fresh water, which will change extraction. But that's kind of another another topic. And then time that's just going to let you make sure everything is drained out or close to it, rather before the next cycle begins. When it comes to temperature, what you can do here is, you know, either, you know, set everyone the same kind of like a normal batch brewer, or you can create a declining temperature profile. So something basically mimicking a kettle where you're starting off with hot water and then maybe ending with a cooler temperature, which is really neat. You could even go the other direction and get hotter if you want. There's a lot to explore there.

That is our advanced profile, but we're going to go back to the main menu. We don't have to save it next to schedule, and that's just going to allow you to have coffee ready for you at whatever time in the morning. So you can program the clock. You can set the guided brew profile, the amount of coffee you want and then frequency either once or, you know, always. And then you've got your your grams there for that profile. Next is settings. And in this menu you'll find a volume for the chime. I kind of like it. I like it around five. Not too annoying okay. Next we've got the clock and then units. And this is where we can set metric imperial. And then we can select, you know precise if we want to get into like grams and milliliters instead of just ounces and cups. And then here in instant brew this is where we can assign a profile to that instant mode. Or if you don't want to you can unselect this and it will just brew whatever's in the reservoir okay. Connectivity. This machine is compatible with Fellow’s app. At the time of filming, this app isn't quite ready, but you will be able to control a lot of these parameters from your phone. You'll get notifications when when the brew is done, and then you'll also be able to like share brew profiles with other people and roasters will be able to have those available for you. It'll be really cool when that's set up. Okay. Maintenance. There is a descale cycle here and then a factory reset and English is our language here. Elevation is kind of interesting. It's basically calibrating the temperature for you so it won't really allow you to set like a temperature say of 210 degrees. If you're way up in the mountains, like it knows basically the max temperature that you can get at a given elevation, and that is it for the menu.

So that is the Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee maker. This thing is really incredible and dare I say, revolutionary for home automatic coffee brewers because it really is three things in one, right? It's a simple auto batch brewer. It's a cold brew coffee maker, but it's also an automated pour over that really does mimic the manual brewing process through pulse frequency, through temperature profiling, just like a manual brewing kettle would. And that makes this brewer appealing to just about anyone who brews coffee. So check out the Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee maker at primacoffee.com. Thanks for watching!