Fellow Aiden Drip Coffee Maker Preview: As Close to Pour-Over as It Gets

I’ve brewed pour-over coffee almost every morning that I’ve spent at home for more than a decade. I’m not one of those people who insists that the routine is a calming moment of zen before a busy day. Often (quite often, with a five- and two-year old who wake up 15 minutes earlier than I do, no matter what time I wake up) I find it cumbersome and more time consuming than I’d like. But pour-over coffee just tastes so much better when I compare it to all the easier coffee-making methods that exist. Now, though, Fellow’s brand-new Aiden Brewer might be the thing that finally lures me back to the world of convenient coffee.

Over the almost-four years that I’ve been testing coffee and espresso makers for Epicurious and Bon Appétit, I’ve used quite a few pieces of equipment that claim to approximate a carafe of pour-over. Some of them make good—even very good—coffee, leaning on different features that mimic the classic pour-over setup. The Ratio 6, for example, models its shower head after the way water is distributed in the pour-over process. The Café Specialty series allows you to adjust water temperature. But Fellow’s new brewer gets the closest of anything I’ve tried.

Fellow is best known for beautiful products that actually do make pour-over coffee: its gooseneck kettle, its burr grinders, its pour-over set. But the Aiden Brewer is the brand’s first electric coffee maker of any kind, and founder Jake Miller swung by the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen to give us a chance to check it out. We rarely cover products that are only available for pre-orders, because we like to use them for weeks (if not months), but what I saw made me want to give you a heads up now. The Aiden can do things that the drip coffee makers I have lived with just can’t. And while Fellow’s reps say they’re not worried about the new brewer selling out, I don’t want to tell you how great something is only to have you end up on a waitlist if you want to try it yourself.

During my 7-cup-of-coffee morning with the Aiden brewer, I was able to adjust water temperature to a single degree between 200℉ and 210℉, change the interval time between pours of water from the shower head, and toggle between brewing single cups and 10-cup carafes. It was possible to customize literally all the variables I take into account when I brew a Chemex carafe and tweak to pull different flavors out of my coffee beans. I could futz and tinker to my heart’s content, and I could save any choices I made to use in future brews, either with a connected app or on the machine’s interface.