Coffee requires only two ingredients to be made at home, yet the industry surrounding the world’s favorite beverage has been hell-bent on making things as complicated as possible for decades. An endless barrage of sexy gadgets promises to optimize every step of the process, and yet to many consumers, the finished product ends up tasting remarkably similar.
No shade to the 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 unavoidable truth: Most people just want to get the coffee in their body with as little fuss as possible.
Given the tension between a quality cup and the time and effort spent brewing it, a coffee machine’s ability to brew delicious coffee with as little friction as possible should be the primary yardstick of greatness. The Fellow Aiden drip coffee machine has plenty of esoteric bells and whistles to tickle the fancy of design-minded coffee geeks, but it also makes really good coffee with minimal hassle. You could replace your dad’s grimy old Mr. Coffee with this handsome 9 x 9 x 12-inch black 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.
Photograph: Pete Cottell
Keeping It Simple
Fellow offers an app to accompany the Aiden, but you don’t need it to start brewing. Smart devices have been elbowing their way into kitchens for a decade now, to wildly varied results. Preheating your oven from the grocery store parking lot is pretty cool and useful, but do you really need a smart blender? And how much time is really saved in the end when countless hours are lost to troubleshooting smart home connections, thumbing through settings, and downloading clunky apps—many of which ask to track your location and force you to check a box on a terms-of-use 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 dialing in 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. To test this theory, I attempted to brew 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 how the Aiden’s “smartness” was a focal point of its prerelease press.
After rinsing the pot and the 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,” dialed in how many ounces of coffee I wanted, popped in the corresponding color-coded brew basket, set the water dial above to match, added the recommended dose of grounds, hit Start, and that was that. Eight ounces of 200-degree-Fahrenheit perfection in about three minutes.
