Why You Can Trust CNET The Fellow Aiden Is a Versatile $365 Drip Brewer for Pour-Over Coffee Nerds
This automatic coffee maker has a number of brewing options and is made by a company known for chic coffee accessories.
- Patrick's play The Cowboy is included in the Best American Short Plays 2011-12 anthology. He co-wrote and starred in the short film Baden Krunk that won the Best Wisconsin Short Film award at the Milwaukee Short Film Festival.
Fellow's new Aiden coffee maker is proof that we live in a time where there's no shortage of ways to get coffee. There's something for you, no matter your caffeinated tastes and desires. Want something that's chilled and that you can drink quickly? There's cold brew. Looking for a latte that has more in common with a slice of cake than coffee? There's plenty of those, especially from a company named after a Moby Dick character.
Then there's specialty coffee, which over the past two decades has been elevated to a level previously reserved for fine wine. Specialty coffee (and the coffee nerds who obsess over it — of which I am proudly one) has grown into a subculture. And there are companies like Fellow that create a wide portfolio of products (grinders, gooseneck kettles and pour-over brewers) aimed at satisfying our snobbery.
Fellow's Aiden precision coffee maker takes all that to another level by offering both convenience and customizable controls. The Aiden can brew a pot of drip coffee at the press of a button, but its brew cycle can also be customized depending on the coffee beans you're using. All this granular control comes at a price that's higher than what you'd pay for a typical budget coffee maker.
The Aiden is set to carry a $365 price tag when it goes on sale later this year, putting it head-to-head with the Moccamaster brewer. But few, if any, other consumer coffee makers rival the Aiden's brewing options — at least on paper.
"When it comes to crafting quality coffee at home, people have to either embrace the manual brew process for that perfect cup or settle for lackluster drip coffee. We created Aiden so no one has to compromise," said Jake Miller, founder and CEO of Fellow.
Miller showed off the cube-shaped Aiden to me at Fellow's product lab here in San Francisco. The coffee maker has a bit of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde quality about it. It can brew a 10-cup pot or a single cup using a more intensive process reminiscent of a pour-over coffee. To do this, it comes with two different brew baskets: a flat-bottom one for batch brews and a smaller cone-shaped basket for single serve. The showerhead is adjustable to optimize both brew styles.
On the inside, things get very unique. Fellow separated the heating unit and the water pump so that each can be customized and controlled. That means you can control how long the coffee blooms or change the temperature of the water during a brew to help bring out the flavor for certain roasts. It also means you can brew cold brew, since the pump isn't dependent on boiling water to work like the majority of drip brewers sold today.
You can select built-in workflows targeted for different roast levels (light, medium and dark) using the circular LCD and a dial.
The Aiden comes with both a flat-bottom and cone-shaped brew basket.
Fellow is also working with specialty coffee roasters to create a specific brew profile for individual coffee roasts. So if a certain roast does better with a longer bloom phase or a higher temperature at the start of a cycle, that can be programmed in and saved as a profile. All you need to do is add that profile to the Aiden via an app and select it when brewing that particular roast. In fact, roasters like Verve Coffee will have a code on their bag that you can scan with your phone to add its brew profile. It's almost like having a coffee roaster brew you a cup of coffee the way they like to make it but in your home.
The Fellow Aiden is available for presale for $365 and will ship in September. If you preorder the brewer, you also get three bags of coffee from: Onyx Coffee Lab, La Cabra, and Verve Coffee Roasters — made specifically for Aiden with scannable profiles.
"Whether you're a coffee connoisseur or simply curious, Aiden is here to enhance your journey," added Miller.
Correction, Apr. 15: Updated the shipping date