Home › Brew Methods › AeroPress vs French press
⚖️ Head-to-Head · 2026The official recipes differ by 20 degrees of water and five minutes of steep. Paper against metal, one cup against a pot, on published figures.
Written and reviewed by the CoffeeLabAdvisor editorial team · Published 9 October 2026
They are both immersion brewers, and almost every number is different. AeroPress's own recipe calls for 185°F (85°C) water, a medium-fine grind and a steep of about 30 seconds, pressed through paper, start to finish in under two minutes. The benchmark French press recipes use 205°F, a coarse grind and four to six minutes, through a metal mesh. That is a 20-degree gap and a five-minute one. The AeroPress makes one cup; a French press makes a pot. Choose on those two, not on taste descriptions.
The four published figures that actually separate the two methods. Two of them — water temperature and steep time — are not close.
Put the published recipes side by side and the two largest differences are the ones nobody mentions.
Water temperature. AeroPress's official recipe calls for 185°F (85°C), listing boiling water only as an alternative. The two benchmark French press recipes we read — Stumptown's and Counter Culture's — both land on 205°F. That is a twenty-degree gap between two methods people treat as interchangeable.
Steep time. The AeroPress steeps for about 30 seconds at a medium-fine grind. Stumptown presses at 4:00 and Counter Culture at 6:00. So the French press holds the coffee in water for eight to twelve times as long.
These two numbers are not independent. Cooler water extracts more slowly, finer grounds extract more quickly, and pressure finishes the job in the AeroPress that time has to do in a press. Each recipe is internally consistent; neither transfers to the other device.
The filter is the difference you can taste without a scale. The AeroPress presses through a paper micro-filter; a French press strains through a metal mesh.
Paper holds back the fine particles and most of the coffee oils. The cup is cleaner, brighter, and leaves nothing in the bottom. Metal passes both, so a French press cup carries more body, a heavier mouthfeel, and a layer of fines that will keep extracting if you leave the coffee sitting in the pot.
That last point is the one with a practical consequence: a French press keeps brewing after you press it. Both benchmark recipes deal with this — the standard advice is to decant into another vessel rather than leave the brewed coffee on the grounds. An AeroPress has no such problem, because the grounds leave the system when you eject the puck.
Capacity settles this more often than flavour does. AeroPress models run from 8 oz on the Go to 20 oz on the XL, and the standard Original is 10 oz — one mug, brewed on demand. A typical French press is 34 oz, and the larger ones reach 50 oz.
So the honest framing is: if you are brewing for one, the AeroPress is built for your situation and the press is oversized. If you are brewing for two or more at the same moment, the press does in one go what the AeroPress would need three or four rounds to do.
Everything else — the grind, the temperature, the cleanup — follows from that. It is worth getting right first.
AeroPress asks for medium-fine, and unusually for a maker it gives a reference setting on a specific grinder: Baratza Encore settings 11–13. Baratza's own instruction book independently lists 12 as the suggested Encore starting point for AeroPress — squarely inside AeroPress's range, from a different company's documentation. Two makers agreeing on a number is rarer than it should be, and it means you can trust this one.
French press sits at the other end of the dial. Both benchmark recipes describe a coarse grind — Stumptown likens it to breadcrumbs, Counter Culture to coarse kosher salt — and Baratza's table puts French Press at setting 28 on the same grinder.
Twelve against twenty-eight, on a forty-step grinder. These are not neighbouring settings, and a grinder that cannot hold a consistent particle size across that span will do one of the two methods badly.
The AeroPress recipe is given as a dose rather than a ratio: 16–18 g, which the maker describes as one heaping scoop, with water to the No. 4 mark. Doubling it means doubling the dose and filling to the No. 8 mark.
The French press is specified as a ratio, and the two benchmark recipes bracket the usable range: Stumptown brews 56 g of coffee to 850 g of water, about 1:15 and the stronger cup; Counter Culture states 1:18, at 45 g to 800 g. For a 34 oz press that works out at roughly 56–67 g of coffee.
The practical difference is that the AeroPress recipe is a fixed, repeatable dose you can learn by hand, while the press expects you to scale to the vessel. Which is another way of saying the AeroPress is easier to make consistent, and the press is easier to make a lot of.
Take the AeroPress if you brew one cup at a time, want it repeatable without weighing, like a clean cup, and want to be done in under two minutes including the wash. It is also the one that survives travel, which is the whole point of the Go.
Take the French press if you brew for more than one person at once, prefer a heavier cup with more body, and would rather wait four minutes than press anything. It is also considerably cheaper to run, because there is nothing to replace.
They are cheap enough that owning both is a normal outcome rather than an indulgence, and they fail at different things: the press cannot make one good cup efficiently, and the AeroPress cannot make four.
One of each, plus the alternatives we document. The AeroPress models differ mainly in capacity and material; the presses differ in whether the carafe is glass or insulated steel.
The standard AeroPress every recipe on this page is written for. Listing states an all-in-one manual coffee maker - French press, pour-over and espresso style - with a 2-minute brew.
Check price on Amazon →
Identical brewer, transparent chamber - useful for watching the steep. Listing states the same AeroPress brewer in clear Tritan - French press, pour-over and espresso style.
Check price on Amazon →
The design icon of the category - the same glass brewing in the classic steel frame. Listing states the Bodum 34 oz Chambord French press in high-heat borosilicate glass with polished stainless steel, made in Portugal.
Check price on Amazon →
The insulated steel press for a full carafe that stays hot; the listing describes the walls, not the lid. Listing states double vacuum-insulated 18/8 stainless steel walls described as naturally BPA-free, a mesh plunger, up to 4 hours hot, and every piece dishwasher safe.
Check price on Amazon →They are different, not ranked. The AeroPress uses a fixed 16–18 g dose with water to the No. 4 mark; a French press is specified as a ratio between 1:15 and 1:18. Strength is set by how you dose each, not by the device.
AeroPress's official recipe calls for 185°F (85°C) with boiling as a listed alternative, while both benchmark French press recipes use 205°F. The AeroPress compensates with a finer grind and pressure; a press needs the heat because it relies on time alone.
The AeroPress. It presses through a paper micro-filter, which holds back fines and most oils. A French press strains through metal mesh, which passes both — giving more body and a sediment layer.
Baratza's own manual lists AeroPress at 12 and French Press at 28 on the original Encore's 40-step dial. AeroPress independently cites Encore 11–13 for its own method, which agrees.
Better not to. The grounds stay in contact through the mesh and keep extracting, so the pot gets bitter as it stands. Decant into another vessel. An AeroPress avoids this because the puck is ejected.
The AeroPress, decisively. About 30 seconds of steep and under two minutes in total, against a press at 4:00 to 6:00 before you have poured anything.
Sources for this page: The AeroPress figures — 16–18 g dose, No. 4 mark, 185°F / 85°C with boiling as the listed alternative, medium-fine grind with the Baratza Encore 11–13 reference, the roughly 30-second steep and the under-two-minutes total: AeroPress's own published recipe and How It Works pages, aeropress.com, read 2026-09-02 · The French press figures — 56 g to 850 g (about 1:15), 205°F, coarse breadcrumb grind, press at 4:00, and the decanting step: Stumptown Coffee Roasters' published French press guide, read 2026-09-02 · The second French press recipe — 45 g to 800 g, the stated 1:18 ratio, 205°F, medium-coarse kosher-salt grind, press at 6:00: Counter Culture Coffee's published quick French press recipe, read 2026-09-02 · The AeroPress 12 and French Press 28 starting settings on the original Encore's 40-step dial: Baratza's Encore instruction manual (manual-encore-en-v4-3-120122), “Adjusting the Grind Size”, read 2026-10-09 · Capacity, material and box contents on the cards below: each product's own Amazon listing copy and AeroPress's compare page, read 2026-09-13 We have not lab-tested brewers; where a figure is a manufacturer's, the page names the manufacturer, and machine capabilities come from our own published review records.