The French Press gets a bad reputation for being difficult to clean and making muddy coffee, but it’s a great immersion brewer that is low cost and easy to use if you do it right. We tested the OXO Brew French Press with GroundsLifter with our brew method and recommend it. If you look at recipes for French Press, you will find a lot that say different things, we have tried many of them and found this combination of different methods to be our favorite. This method will give you a nice clean cup and is easy to clean up.

Here is what you will need:

• French Press
• Whole Bean Coffee
• Burr Grinder
• Kitchen Scale
• Clean Filtered Water – Preferably Soft
• Kettle (Electric or Stove Top)
• Timer (If not integrated in your scale)

Here are the instructions:

1. Boil the water in your kettle.
2. While your water is warming, using the recipe sheet and on the resources page, grind your coffee by weight to a medium ground. The recipe sheet is based off of 60 grams of coffee per liter of water, however for French Press you can go as high as 75 grams of coffee per liter of water. For our example we use 42 grams for 700 ml of water. You can adjust to ratio between 1:13 to 1:17.
3. Pour the ground coffee into the French Press.
4. Start your timer and add 2-3x the weight of the coffee in boiling water, swirl and stir to ensure all the grounds are saturated then wait for 30-45 seconds.
5. Pour the remaining water.
6. Swirl again and allow the brew to steep for a total of 4:00.
7. At the end of 4:00 all of the particles should have fallen to the bottom, place the lid on the French Press and plunge only to the surface of the brew. You don’t want to plunge all the way down as it will stir up all the coffee.
8. Gently pour the coffee trying not to cause the grounds at the bottom to stir up, between pours you may need to plunge down just to the surface again for faster flow.
9. Do not wash coffee grounds down your drain, you can throw them in the trash or use them for compost. If you don’t have the OXO, then pour the grounds into a sieve/strainer then discard or compost them.

If you’re looking for an immersion brew method with a filter, check out the Clever Dripper or AeroPress.