Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee Maker Review

By: Steven Streitfeld

The Incurable Case of Upgraditis

    A few months ago the glass coffee pot for my Ninja Coffee Maker broke, and while there was nothing wrong with it. I saw it as an opportunity rather than a tragedy. You see, for months I had been getting pelted with ads from Fellow for their then soon to be released state-of-the-art coffee brewer, the Aiden Precision Coffee Maker. I saw the Youtube videos of the head designer (a guy who looks like he knows his way around a coffee bean) Nick Terzulli showing of their new pride and joy at various coffee conventions. I had been infected with Upgraditis.

    One problem that I had encountered was that there was a waitlist to order the coffee maker from Fellow's own website, and I wouldn't receive the device until sometime in October. Just by coincidence I was checking out Crate and Barrel's website for an unrelated item, and I saw that there was a sale of coffee equipment going on through their site. While I was perusing their wares I saw an item listing for the Fellow Aiden, of course it was not on sale. However I saw that if I ordered from their website, I could get it by the following week (this was early September). A pop up on their website said I could get 10% off my first order for signing up for their email list, and I tried applying the code to the Fellow Aiden in my shopping cart. To my surprise, it worked! 

A coffee maker that costs how much? 

    Now, if you have looked into the Fellow Aiden even once, the first thing that will jump out to you is the price. At a whopping $365, it is not joking around, but it also made some pretty bold claims on there websites about the consistent high and even extraction yields. The 10% off coupon and a healthy sum of unused credit card cash back points meant that I didn't have to spend any money to test out their assertions. I went ahead and placed the order, and within a week, a big brown box showed up at my door, a month ahead of where it would have been if I had ordered it directly from the manufacturer.

    So what does $365 get you, or in my case $328.50 plus tax? Included in the fanciest feeling cardboard box you've ever seen is the Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee Maker itself of course, a "Single Brew Basket", a "Batch Brew Basket", a stainless steel dual-walled carafe, a few manuals for getting started, and about 15 filters for both the single and batch brew functions. Aside from the carafe, all parts of the Aiden Coffee Maker are BPA free plastic, and it is only currently offered in matte black. If I were a betting person, based on Fellow's history, I would expect there to be a matte white version some time in the future, but I think the black option looks sleek especially since the screen in black too, so it's very monotone. The water tank can be removed to take to your water source, or you can lift the lid and pour in the water while it is on the machine. The water tank has measurement markings indicating the water level in both milliliters and ounces. Set up for the coffee maker is very simple. When you plug in the machine, the brightly lit LCD screen in the top left corner. In the initialization you will set the preferred language, current time, elevation above sea level, and your desired units (imperial or metric). 

    Speaking of the settings, let's run through what you will see. To navigate through the screen, you will use a very pleasant scrolling wheel that can be clicked to select whatever is highlighted. On the first menu you will see the following options: Instant Brew, Guided Brew, Edit Profiles, Schedule, and Settings. 

    Instant Brew, as the name would suggest, will by default brew whatever water you have filled in the tank through whatever coffee grounds you have placed in the machine. This setting is for people who would want to treat this coffee maker just like they would any budget coffee maker. You can change how instant brew works on your machine in the settings if you find you've developed a routine and you just want to one press your way to a cup of coffee.

    Guided Brew will be more of a specialized process. When you click this option it will take you to a submenu which asks how darkly roasted your coffee is (Light, Medium, and Dark specifically). Curiously you will also see an option for Cold Brew, more on that in a minute. If you select a roast level, the next prompt will ask you how many Milliliters or Cups of water you want to use in your brew. If the number is under 450 Milliliter or 3 Cups, the numbers will be green, indicating that the Single Brew cone shaped basket should be inserted. Above this amount, the numbers will turn blue, indicating you should switch the the Batch Brew basket. There is a chip in each basket, so it will know if you have the correct basket installed. Once you select your desired amount of water and click the wheel, you will move to the next screen asking you to add the set ratio of ground coffee in the filter, by default it is set to 1:16 coffee to water for medium and dark roasts, and 1:17 for light roasts. In the shower screen is a switch that you can twist depending on which color coordinated brew basket you are using. If the switch is set incorrectly, the machine will prompt you to switch it. Once you click the wheel confirming the coffee grounds are in the machine will start to bloom and a timer will appear on the screen telling you how long you have to wait for coffee to be done. It will update you as it reaches each stage of the brew and chime delightfully when it is complete. When brewing with the batch brew, the machine will require you to use the included carafe, but if you are using the single brew setting you can brew directly into a mug or tumbler. When you brew using Guided Brew, the Aiden will only use the amount of water selected in the settings, even if you have more in there, so it's easy to overfill the coffee maker without stressing whether you have the right amount of water in the tank.

    Edit Profiles will let you customize just about every part of the brewing process. In here you can adjust the default brew ratios, how long you want the bloom phase to last, the bloom ratio, each of the pulse phases, and the temperature for each phase of the brewing process. You can also create your own custom brewing profiles from scratch by setting each of stage of the brew. Lastly in this section you can also find specialized suggested brewing profiles from a few coffee roasters, such as Onyx and Verve, and Fellow have said they intend to continue to present new suggested profiles on into the future, which can be accessed (eventually) on their Fellow App, more on that in a bit. With every small detail customizable, you can truly push the simple act of coffee extraction into the realm of scientific experiment.

    Schedule will allow you to program the Aiden to brew coffee to fit your schedule. The ingenious thing that Aiden does here is when you schedule the machine to brew, the time that you schedule is actually when the brew will be finished! Gone are the days where you have to do sleepy, late night math to try and make sure the coffee maker will be done in time for you to rush out the door. If you need the coffee to be done at 7:30 AM, it will finish brewing at 7:30 AM. I have found this feature extremely useful when it comes to the Cold Brew setting that I briefly mentioned before. This machine brews cold brew a different way than you may be accustomed to. Instead of a 12 - 24 immersion brew in the fridge, Aiden will do a hot bloom phase and then a slow, room temperature drip over the course of 3 hours (by default). Three hours is lightning fast for cold brew, though I guess you could call it room temp brew, but too long for me to want to wait around for it to brew. This is where the scheduling setting comes in handy. If I schedule the cold brew function the night before, then I can set when I want the coffee to be ready when I wake up in the morning, and that solves the waiting problem. Schedule allows you to set the schedule for one day, or for each specific day of the week if you have a consistent or predictable routine. In the schedule menu you can set your coffee parameters just like under guided brew.

    Settings lets you change the basic settings such as time, units of measurement, language, elevation above sea level, and the volume of the beep when coffee is done. You can also connect the coffee maker to your Wi-Fi and bluetooth, but as I alluded to earlier, the App functionality as of writing this review has not come to fruition. On the Fellow App you can link your coffee brewer, extend the manufacturers warranty to two years, and create a basic profile for your equipment, but that is it for now. You can't currently program your coffee maker from your phone, you can't access recipes from other Aiden users, and you can't share your brew recipes with other Aiden brewers. It's slightly disappointing to see that they couldn't get it all done before shipping the units out, but in a world where just about every new tech device or video game has bugs that have to be worked out after launch, it has become the new norm.

But wait... How does it taste??

    I am slightly limited with what I have been able to test so far because I don't have a filter coffee grinder yet, so I can only get pre ground coffee currently. I decided to try a few different roasts of Peet's Coffee since there was a sale. I got a medium roast from the "Bright Collection", and I got their crowd favorite Major Dickason's dark roast. 

    The medium roast advertised that it had some acidic tasting notes, and I could definitely taste those notes. It was a very bright and somewhat juicy flavor profile. Peet's offers an even lighter roast in their Bright Collection which would probably have even more of those notes. If you are a drinker who enjoys a juicy cup of coffee, this machine can definitely deliver that to you in spades.

    The Major Dickason's dark roast had that roasty, bitter flavor that you would expect with a more developed roast. It paired supremely well with milk, and it also made for a tasty and rich cold brew. It was in fact so bitter, that I went back to Target to exchange it for the Big Bang medium roast, which tones down those bitter flavors while leaving the acidic taste out of the cup.

    I have not tweaked the customizing settings yet, and I would have to read more literature on coffee brewing to be confident that an adjustment would make sense. That is the genius in the Aiden's function to my thinking. I am somebody who is not the foremost thinker on coffee extraction, but the process is intuitive enough for me to get something unique and enjoyable right out of the box. While it would seem insane to invest so much in a coffee maker to just use the instant brew function, it would be an option for even the most casual coffee drinker. The intuitive controls make it easy to learn and evolve with the machine as you refine your tastes, and the promise of connecting with a community of coffee lovers, whenever the App functionality is activated, will likely supercharge those lessons. I am certain that the Aiden would pair supremely well with either the Fellow Opus or the more premium Fellow Ode Gen 2, and stylistically it would match the aesthetic.

Downsides?

    It goes almost without saying that biggest downside is the priced in barrier for entry. The $365 admission ticket is not the most absurd thing a coffee lover will run into, especially when you consider its pricier sibling, the Espresso Machine, but it is a pretty penny. Considering all that you get with your money, the thousands of hours of research and development deserve the price tag. Still that means that if you have a limited budget, or aren't picky with your coffee tastes, this machine probably is not for you, or you should wait until it could be acquired for a 15% to 20% discount when sales season rolls around.

    While the design and build are no slouch, it is almost entirely made of plastic. It is not the flimsiest plastic feel, but a little bit more metal in the construction would have helped make it feel more premium. I am sure that this was intentional to keep the already high price tag from soaring even higher. Given all of the features put into the machine, I would rather have those included the a fully premium build.

    I mentioned it before, but the fact that a premium product like this shipped without full capabilities vis-a-vis the smart app, is disappointing. There are more than enough features to keep me busy for now, but how long do we have to wait for part of the package to become functional? A few weeks? A few months? What if someone bought the product for this feature and then when it comes out it is underwhelming. Software updates can always fix things in post to use an industry term, but it weakens the product initially.

    Lastly, this is something more of a nit-pick, but it is worth mentioning. The height of the Aiden is enough to fit underneath my cabinets, but if I want to lift the shower head to put the coffee filter in, it won't open all of the way. For that reason I have to slide the coffee maker forward to get in there. For that reason if your kitchen has lower cabinets it could be frustrating trying to use your coffee maker. The water tank is less of an issue because you can take it off of the mount to fill it up.

Should you buy it?

    So with all of these thoughts, who is the Aiden Precision Coffee Maker for? The answer to this question has to do with your relationship with coffee. If you are a person who just sees coffee as "wake up juice" or you have no interest getting into the weeds with coffee brewing, your money would be better spent elsewhere. Likewise if money is tight for you and you are wondering if this coffee maker will change your life, you can save your money for now and continue enjoying your current coffee maker until you've run it into the ground. But if you are a person who is enamored with the idea of coffee, who likes testing the boundaries of what you can do with coffee, who wants repeatable and consistent results, or somebody who wants that pour over experience but doesn't have the time or patience in their busy lives, the Aiden will fit perfectly into your kitchen. The ability to experiment with different elements to the minute level of detail that previously only a human could do is game changing. The possibility (in the future) to share what you've discovered with a community of coffee nerds is exciting. If you want to have the same great coffee experience time after time for just yourself, or for a group of people, then this is definitely for you. The Aiden truly feels like an evolution in the coffee world that will push coffee at home forward. You can buy a ticket on this train, or you can wait until a less expensive similar ticket comes along in the next few years. All in all, I give the Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee Maker Four out of Five Coffee Beans.