After gently pushing down the plunger give the coffee another minute to let the fines sink down which the push stirred up from the bottom.
The plunger thus rather keeps the sunk grinds and fines down when slowly pouring, it does not filter the coffee.
An excellent cup from the French press takes 5-7 minutes.
It's like French food: best enjoyed slowly.
The thing distinguishing the aeropress from pour over or French press is that by using the plunger you can still get water through the filter even with finely ground coffee beans. By using a finer grind, you can extract more flavor from the coffee with less water, lower water temperature, and/or shorter time, and thereby get stronger coffee while avoiding some of the more bitter larger molecules.
And pressing the little puck into the rubbish can is gratifying and fun.
Camping friendly is a serious plus. I have one in my camp trailer. Anytime someone goes with us, I end up making another Aeropress convert.
It is stupid simple, robust, easy, fun.
This makes no sense to me. The aeropress is the least messy coffee device I’ve ever used (after use just eject the puck of compressed grounds straight into the compost bin, and if desired give the parts a quick rinse), except maybe for those k-cup machines.
> Tastewise I've tried it with both metal and paper filters and regular and reverse method, as well as different types and grains of coffee - there's no tangible difference to a decent French press.
Taste depends on grind size, water temperature, water-to-coffee ratio, and steep time (and the paper filter).
If you use a very coarse grind and a metal filter, you’ll get approximately the same results with a French press vs. an aeropress.
If you use a very fine grind (or even a medium grind) then the French press does not work because the filter is too coarse (unless you want your coffee to be full of grounds). That takes out a huge part of the available parameter space.
Personally I like steeping very finely ground coffee at moderate water temperature (80–85 °C), for not too much time. I use the paper filters. It is not possible as far as I can tell to obtain similar results with a French press.