Review: Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee Maker

Coffee requires only two ingredients to be made at home, yet the industry surrounding the world's favorite beverage has been hell-bent on making things as complicated as possible for decades. An endless barrage of sexy gadgets promises to optimize every step of the process, and yet to many consumers, the finished product ends up tasting remarkably similar.

No shade to the people who maximize their morning ritual with aesthetically pleasing trinkets like a $2,650 coffee grinder or a $208 electric kettle, but the fact that McDonald’s sells 8 million cups of coffee a day speaks to an unavoidable truth: Most people just want to get the coffee in their body with as little fuss as possible.

Given the tension between a quality cup and the time and effort spent brewing it, a coffee machine's ability to brew delicious coffee with as little friction as possible should be the primary yardstick of greatness. The Fellow Aiden drip coffee machine has plenty of esoteric bells and whistles to tickle the fancy of design-minded coffee geeks, but it also makes really good coffee with minimal hassle. You could replace your dad’s grimy old Mr. Coffee with this handsome 9 x 9 x 12-inch black cube and he probably wouldn’t complain for more than five minutes, which says a lot about its user-friendly interface and ease of use.

Keeping It Simple

Fellow offers an app to accompany the Aiden, but you don’t need it to start brewing. Smart devices have been elbowing their way into kitchens for a decade now, to wildly varied results. Preheating your oven from the grocery store parking lot is pretty cool and useful, but do you really need a smart blender? And how much time is really saved in the end when countless hours are lost to troubleshooting smart home connections, thumbing through settings, and downloading clunky apps—many of which ask to track your location and force you to check a box on a terms-of-use page that includes questionable arbitration clauses? Is all this really necessary for a batch of muffins or a cup of coffee?

One could easily get lost in the weeds dialing in settings like roast type, elevation, or presets for beans from iconic roasters like Onyx and Verve, but it’s just as easy to skip all that and start brewing. To test this theory, I attempted to brew a cup of coffee without reading the manual or connecting to the proprietary app. This took me about eight minutes, which is a remarkable feat considering how the Aiden’s “smartness” was a focal point of its prerelease press.

After rinsing the pot and the water reservoir, I turned the single black knob to “wake up” the machine and scan its menu on the vibrant LED screen. I selected “Guided Brew,” dialed in how many ounces of coffee I wanted, popped in the corresponding color-coded brew basket, set the water dial above to match, added the recommended dose of grounds, hit Start, and that was that. Eight ounces of 200-degree-Fahrenheit perfection in about three minutes.

Simplicity aside, the most significant trick the Aiden pulls off is its ability to scale batch sizes up and down without sacrificing quality or efficiency. Whether you want 5 or 50 ounces—the minimum and maximum batch sizes, respectively—the Aiden brews crisp, clean coffee that rivals the quality of fussy, manual methods like AeroPress or pour-over.

In the morning I brew a big pot for my partner and myself, which is as simple as swapping in the blue basket—which uses flat-bottom No. 4 filters—and adjusting the size of the batch on the interface. For a smaller batch after lunch, I’ll swap in the green basket, which uses No. 1 filters similar to what the pour-over system you may replace with this utilizes.

I’ve been burned a few times by not being alerted the water was low until brewing began, which is a buzzkill inferior machines from Keurig are engineered to avoid. On that note, a warming plate would be another nice feature for the former scenario, as it’s rare my partner and I are up at the exact same time, but the sturdy, double-walled metal pot retains a decent amount of heat, with the temperature of the brew dropping from 200 degrees Fahrenheit to 170 after sitting for 30 minutes.

A User-Friendly Feat

The Aiden also offers a handy “profile” system that lets you create presets for various scenarios or users. These allow you to adjust and save settings like output volume and brewing temperature, along with light versus dark roast, which I’m not entirely convinced does much of anything after a few blind tests of light and dark roasts brewed with both options. Caffeine junkies in search of a more automated replacement for their beloved pour-over ritual will love the “bloom” options in the advanced settings of the profile builder, which allow you to tweak the ratio, duration, and temperature of the water that’s poured during the bloom portion of the brewing cycle.

Pulse settings can be independently edited for both small batch (green basket) and large batch (blue basket) brew sessions. Finding your way out of these deep dives into the menus can be tedious, and a long-press gesture that goes back to the home screen would be an appreciated upgrade in future firmware updates.

Scheduling the auto-brew setting is a breeze thanks to the clear and concise LED screen—no more holding down a button while feverishly pressing another to dial in the correct time, only for it to land on PM instead of AM by accident. The dial is stepped for relatively jitter-free selection, however it did tend to miss every third or fourth turn during my daily use across the span of three weeks.

Fellow alleges the app will soon make it easy to save, swap, and load profiles; dial in settings; and create schedules. In my testing it refused to connect if I didn’t allow it to access my location, which is annoying and unsettling. Moreover, at time of publication the app does nothing aside from offer some info about the device's firmware. One would assume the app will do something someday, but the full breadth of the Aiden’s functionality is available without it at present, which is a rare win for Luddites amid this current boom of overly connected domestic devices.

Useless app and finicky dial aside, the Aiden is a user-friendly feat of gadgetry that’s a great option for coffee lovers of all stripes. It’s feature-rich without being overengineered, and it brews a fantastic pot of coffee at any size. The advanced features are intuitive and accessible, and the build quality is top-notch. The $365 price tag is a hefty one for a coffee maker, but it may be the last one you buy for a while, or at least until Skynet takes over our smart devices and uses them to eradicate humanity once and for all.