All images courtesy of American Press.
When water and coffee are combined for an active method of brewing,
it’s usually the water that’s moved through the coffee and not the other
way around. Yet with a novel new brewing system called the
American Press,
the opposite is true: grounds contained in a sealed filter basket are
manually pushed through the water, which presents an intriguing new set
of variables to consider.
Factors such as water temp and input ratio are familiar, while the
relationship of dose and grind with brewing duration and water pressure
as manipulated in real time by the user’s manual pressing technique —
the pushing of the coffee basket down through the water — constitutes a
new and unexplored interplay in the brewing process. So while the
American Press looks very much like a French press, it actually has more
in common with Aeropress and espresso in terms of fundamental brewing
principles.
The production process for the brewer is only just approaching its
pre-manufacturing fundraising stage, having achieved certain social
media goals prior to a scheduled Nov. 9 soft-launch of a formal
IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign that kicks off in earnest the following
day. Yet the device itself and the product rollout plan have been in
steadfast development for more than four years.
The American Press has gone through several rounds of prototyping and
already appears in several polished-looking promotional videos. Its
inventor, Alex Albanese, has taken it to various roasteries and cafes in
the Detroit area for taste and experience testing among professionals
and consumers alike. He believes that the American Press will hit a
sweet spot between usability and innovation, having an Aeropress-caliber
impact on the connoisseur demographic while also appealing to coffee
novices with its familiar form, simple process and easy clean-up.
The brewing carafe is a double-wall insulated Tritan, which is the
same clear, resilient, BPA-free and dishwasher-safe co-polyester resin
used in Vitamix pitchers, CamelBak bottles and other popular vessels.
The top cap, handle, plunger and filters are all solid stainless steel,
including a pouring spout designed to be drip-free. The structure of the
filter basket is also Tritan. The seals around the filters are
silicone, which fit tightly enough to direct positive water pressure but
are smooth enough for easy operation.
The lower filter is wider gauged for better water flow into the
coffee, while the steel mesh upper filter is spec’d to a filtration
fineness of 150 microns, which is finer than the
Able Disc Fine though not as fine as the 60-micron wire-mesh
Kaffeologie S Filter.
Albanese has stated that if demand is there, an optional super-fine
filter can be designed and included later, as the filters are easy to
install and remove from the device.
Albanese, also the founder and CEO of the American Press company, is a
self-described “washed-up physicist” with a background in applied
physics and human-centered design, which is the approach to design from
an anthropological perspective, studying closely how people interact
with products and looking for unmet needs. As a longtime coffee-lover,
Albanese was naturally drawn towards coffee-related products, and found
himself studying the way people interact with French presses.
“It’s not that hard to clean out a French press, but people just
don’t like doing it,” Albanese observed. So initially the goal was to
make a French-press-like brewer that was simply easier to clean,
although soon after making his first few prototypes, Albanese realized
there was much more to his idea than easy clean-up.
“I try to avoid overstating the ‘easier to clean’ part,” said
Albanese, noting that the hands-on nature of the brewing method coupled
with its spectacular display of the brewing event are the aspects more
central to its appeal. “To see the column of clear water just kind of
disappearing and turning into a column of coffee is one of the most
interesting things about it. It really is this sort of magical
water-to-coffee moment, it’s very visual, it’s very engaging.”
The name came about not in an effort to wave any flags, but as a
means to differentiate his design from the French press — which is
itself actually Italian — as well as simply due to a distaste for the
portmanteaus and made-up words that dominate consumer goods these days.
Meanwhile, prior to pursuing the American Press dream, Albanese had put
his research skills to work for other heavy hitters in the consumer
products industry. This included some consulting work for Dyson, the
makers of vacuum cleaners and bladeless fans.
“They’re all about prototyping,” said Albanese of the Dyson company,
which imparted in him the importance of investing in pre-manufacturing
fine-tuning as he set out to make the earliest American Press prototypes
himself. Said Albanese, “I spent four months in a machine shop, walking
in initially and not even knowing how to use a drill press. I didn’t
know how to use a tool to save my life.”
Albanese considers prototyping to be a form of insurance against
problems down the line. “It doesn’t matter who you are, it could be
Dyson, it could be Bodum, it could be anybody,” he said. “You don’t know
for sure that your first run at tooling is going to work.” Yet while
bigger companies have the finances to cover additional runs of tooling
if the first run is faulty, the fledgling American Press company does
not, which makes the greatest possible extent of certainty an even more
important asset.
“What I’ve done with this, in addition to all the other homework, is
put a lot of work into prototyping to make as sure as possible that we
can just cut a check for tooling and it’s going to come out right the
first time around,” said Albanese, “which is also to the point of not
just getting the product to crowdfunding backers, but getting it to them
as fast as possible.”
The business plan depends on the crowdfunding campaign that Albanese
and his team of marketers and consultants have been preparing for
months. Albanese’s strategy of
Facebook
and other social media benchmarks, combining market research with
valuable pre-campaign word-of-mouth publicity, calls to mind another
recently successful coffee-related project: the
Precision Coffee Grinder by
Handground,
which made concerted social media and publicity efforts prior to
launching a campaign that set a goal of $35,000 and netted over
$300,000.
Albanese says that after all these years and so much invested in
expensive prototyping and other preparations, the friends-and-family
money tap has been tightened off, but if the campaign is wildly
successful right off the bat, he thinks he might be able to wring out a
few more behind-the-scenes loans to cut a check for tooling before the
campaign is even over. “I can honestly say that if the campaign blew up
the first week, and I could get the folks that have gotten me this far
to just cut the check I need for tooling, and everything went really
smoothly, then I could potentially get these to people about three to
five months after the campaign closes.”
While the likelihood of a first-timer’s manufacturing endeavor going
“really smoothly” may seem slim, Albanese is optimistic even there,
having pursued factories he learned about through industry connections.
Unable to find a manufacturing plant on American soil that could do all
that needed to be done, Albanese settled on a factory overseas that has
“made stuff for the big boys,” including some well-known and
well-reputed brand-name products. “They know what they’re doing, they
probably make half the stuff that’s in Bed Bath and Beyond,” said
Albanese. “It’s a pretty hardcore, high-end factory.”
“If I were to plan for delays, what I would be telling people is
still probably above average,” added Albanese, who believes the worst
case scenario would be six months after cutting a check for tooling.
The American Press designer envisions a scenario in which the product
is introduced to patrons in service environments rather than to
shoppers in retail stores, in hopes that people get to see and
experience the brewing process while also learning about coffee in
general. “I think it would make a great experience for people at a
restaurant or café, and they would walk away with a much more in-depth
understanding of the product than if it were just sitting on a store
shelf,” said Albanese, who reported having already engaged in extensive
discussions with one national department store chain.
Yet he’s averse to going the department store route for reasons
beyond the non-interactive nature of a static shelf display. For one
thing, cafés see the novelty as exciting and attractive, whereas
department stores tend to view innovation as problematic in terms of
product recognition and categorization. Moreover, Albanese is reluctant
at this point to sign any contracts with retailers whose primary
objective seems to be to drive the retail price of a new product down as
far as possible, without considering its effect on the quality of the
product. Said Albanese, “I really care about this product, I’ve invested
a lot of time in it. I have no interest in making a product that I
don’t believe in.”
Albanese said that future products and accessories in the American
Press line may include additional filters for other applications such as
steeping tea, or a glass carafe once there’s money in the budget for
further R&D. Before going higher-end, though, he intends to
introduce a lighter-weight model that is more geared towards camping and
travel, that would also have the benefit of a lower price point. As the
current model is essentially a single-serving brewer, he also intends
to develop a larger model for multiple servings at once. For now,
though, Albanese believes that the ease of use and the enjoyment of the
spectacle of the American Press will inspire users to take pleasure in
making multiple brews in a row, taking turns watching a magical “water
to coffee” moment unfold again and again.
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