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- Brews amazing filter coffee
- Easy to use
- Class-leading adjustability
- Thermal carafe could be better
- Deserves good coffee to be at its best
- No integrated water filter
The Fellow Aiden’s design brief must have been pretty simple: build a filter coffee machine that makes world-class coffee without requiring a barista qualification. It’s a brief the Aiden doesn’t just fulfil, though; it over-delivers, satisfying the needs of the beginner and the desires of knob-twiddling enthusiasts all at once – and it just happens to be rather stylish, too.
The brilliance here is that all that complexity is invisible to the average user. If you want to just get brewing with two button presses, you can. But if you prefer to carefully craft a specific brewing profile with temperature, bloom time and pouring pulses set by degrees and seconds, the settings menu ushers you behind the counter and offers you the barista apron.
It’s refreshingly flexible, too. You can choose to brew a single cup of coffee directly into your favourite cup, or fill the Aiden’s thermal carafe to the brim with 1.5 litres of finely brewed coffee. And if you fancy a jug of cold brew, it can do that, too.
In short, the Fellow Aiden is a filter coffee machine that’s as simple or as complex as you want it to be. And whichever skill level you’re at, it brews a consistently superb coffee. The question is whether that’s worth £365.
Fellow Aiden: What do you get for the money?
The Aiden’s styling is unapologetically modern. Where rivals such as the Moccamaster KBG Select cling stubbornly to 1960s retro, the Aiden’s squared-off body is all perfect right angles and futuristic minimalism. The only curves you’ll find are the little circular dial and round OLED display on the front, and the organic, rounded curves of the thermal carafe. As for colours, well, you can choose between black or white.
The mostly plastic build may seem a little surprising given the price, but the Aiden doesn’t feel cheap in the slightest. Every part slots together with a pleasingly snug precision and the metal-bodied thermal carafe feels solid and well-made. The water tank fits neatly into the left hand side, and the see-through plastics are interrupted only by the 150ml markings stretching from the bottom to the top of its 1.5-litre capacity. Turn the machine over, and a cable tidy allows you to wrap the mains cable away neatly to remove excess slack. The attention to detail is reassuring.
You get two filter baskets in the box, both with colour-coded handles so the OLED display can tell you which to use. The green handled single-serve cone basket takes size 2 paper filters, and this is for smaller brews of 450ml or less. There’s no drip-stop valve on this basket, because it’s designed so you can brew directly into a mug or travel cup. You can still use the thermal carafe if you prefer, though.
The blue, batch-brew filter basket uses flat-bottomed 8-12 cup paper filters, and this lets you brew anything from 525ml to 1.5 litres of coffee. You will need to use the thermal carafe here, however, as the basket has a drip-stop valve, which stops the flow of coffee through the basket when the carafe is removed and opens it again when replaced.
The valve is there so you can yank out the jug mid-brew, pour yourself a cup and slot it back into place without losing more than a few drips. And as there’s no hotplate, you don’t need to worry about coffee drips getting baked on.
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity is on the cards, too. Install the Fellow app on your Android or iOS device and while Bluetooth handles the initial app pairing, the Aiden then connects to your Wi-Fi network. This allows it to automatically set the time for its onscreen clock, and automatically download and install firmware updates. The main purpose of the app, however, is to let you quickly adjust the preset brewing modes, customise your own profiles, and schedule brews, without having to squint at the small on-device display.
What is it like to use?
It may be advanced, but one of the Fellow Aiden’s greatest strengths is that it allows beginners – or the entirely disinterested – to just brew a coffee without any faff. Want a quick filter brew? No problem. Chuck water in the tank, a sensible amount of ground coffee in the filter basket and it takes two taps of the dial. Once to wake the machine, once to select Instant Brew.
In Instant Brew mode, the Aiden will brew the maximum amount for each of the two baskets. With the green basket, that means it’ll brew up to 450ml. With the blue basket, it’ll brew until the water tank is empty, up to its 1.5 litre capacity. If you just want to throw a few spoonfuls of coffee in and get going, then this is by far the easiest option.
If, however, you’d prefer the Instant Brew mode to brew a specific amount of coffee – and be tailored to a specific roast type – then you can delve into the settings menu and change the default behaviour. If you want 750ml of coffee and a dark roast brewing profile you can set it and forget it.
From here on in, things start to get a bit more involved. Your next option is Guided Brew. Here, you select the brewing profile for your specific coffee beans, choosing between light, medium, dark roast or cold brew. Then you pick how much coffee you want to brew, and the display will tell you which filter basket to use and advise you to turn the shower head to the corresponding colour – this ensures it wets the coffee evenly for each basket type.
With the basket in place, the OLED screen tells you exactly how much coffee you need to add in grammes. Tap the dial again and the brew begins, with a countdown timer appearing onscreen, along with a brief text description of the current stage of the brewing process.
But that’s not all. You can also create your own brewing profiles and save them so they can be selected from the main menu later. And you can choose to either subtly adjust the settings slightly away from the default roast profiles, or radically rework the whole process.
The starting point is the bloom, where a small amount of water is poured onto the dry coffee grinds to release the trapped CO2 and ensure a more even extraction. Here, you can adjust the bloom ratio, which is the ratio of water used to the amount of ground coffee. For instance, a 2:1 ratio means that it will use 20ml of water for every 10 grammes of coffee. And you can also adjust the bloom time and water temperature, too, between 50°C and 99°C in single degree increments.
Intriguingly, you can adjust the bloom and brewing temperature separately. This is a feature Fellow uses in its own Dark Roast profile to minimise bitterness. This sets the bloom to 99°C but then drops the temperature to 85°C for the brewing process. The reason is simple: the longer roasting process means darker beans are more porous, so you don’t need such high temperatures to extract all the good flavours.
Alternatively, you can delve even deeper. For instance, you can change the brew from a single pulse, where all the water is poured through in one go, which is best suited to bigger brews, or opt for multiple pulses (anything up to 60), which split the brew into shorter pours with timed breaks to allow the brewing process to work its magic. This mimics the effect of manual pour-over brewing, where you pour a set volume of water over the grounds from a kettle, then add a second and/or third “pulse”. You can even change the water temperature for each individual pulse if you really know what you are doing.
All these adjustments can also be done either on the machine itself using the dial and display or on the app and, arguably, the latter is the easier method. While the Aiden’s small round display looks cute, it doesn’t display much information. And if you’re really getting stuck into adjusting multiple settings, having it all on the screen of your phone makes the process far quicker.
In the US, Fellow Aiden owners can take advantage of the Fellow Drops coffee club, and this provides a curated range of filter-specific coffee beans from independent roasteries around the world – these recipes appear both on the Aiden’s Guided Brew menu and in the app. Each roastery provides a specific recipe for its beans, both for the smaller, single-serve baskets and the larger batch basket, so all you have to do is get the grind consistency correct – and have a decent grinder – to brew a perfect cup.
Even UK users can browse these recipes, though, and an increasing number of top-notch coffee roasteries have started to share their own Aiden profiles for specific coffee beans online. If you’ve always wondered where you’re going wrong with your filter brews, then this is akin to having a barista wander into your kitchen and tweak all the settings for you. To my mind, it’s something of a game changer.
The other benefit to the app is that you can use it to schedule brews. Add your preferred amount of coffee and water before you go to bed – yes, the app tells you exactly how much coffee to add, both in grammes and tablespoon measurements – and you can wake to the aroma of freshly brewed coffee.
Cleaning is straightforward. Fellow recommends a regular wipe down with a clean, damp cloth. For more stubborn coffee stains, it recommends the use of Urnex’s excellent Cafiza coffee cleaner. This is available in both powder and tablet form, and it’s an essential thing to have in the cupboard in my opinion. If you find the aluminium interior of the carafe starts to look stained with coffee residue, a quick wipe down with a weak Cafiza solution – or a longer soak – will have it looking like new.
There’s no built-in water filter in the Aiden, so I’d recommend using a water filter jug to reduce limescale build-up. Even if you do, however, you will probably need to descale on a regular basis if you use the machine regularly; roughly every three to six months, according to Fellow. It very much depends on the water hardness in your area. Fellow recommends the use of a “high quality biodegradable and phosphate-free coffee machine liquid descaler” and suggests Urnex Dezcal.
What is the coffee like?
I tested the Aiden over a couple of months with a wide variety of beans, including light, medium and dark roasts. I tried some brews with pre-ground supermarket coffee, but the most interesting results were with freshly ground coffee. I used a variety of grinders, including my go-to Baratza Vario W+ grinder and the KingGrinder K6 hand grinder, but ended up sticking with the Fellow Ode Gen 2 grinder for most of the testing as it was just a tad easier to dial in and get the brews tasting just so.
The coffee was consistently superb. The Guided Brew presets rewarded with great tasting cups ranging from floral, tea-like light roasts, through to fruity, balanced medium roasts and potent, nutty, chocolate-heavy dark roasts. On occasion, I found some improvements simply by tweaking the brew temperature a degree or two hotter or colder, but in the main I didn’t really feel the need to fiddle too much.
Cold brew was a bit of a revelation, too. It’s not something I drink all too often, but in the midst of a UK heatwave, the option to have a cool brewed coffee with all the interesting flavours of a traditional brew were really welcome. Given the 90-minute brewing time, it’s not a quick option, but brew a full 1.5-litre carafe and there’s more than enough to sip throughout an afternoon for two or three people.
Fellow Aiden review: What could be better?
I love the design of the thermal carafe for its simplicity, but its pouring spout isn’t sealed with a valve, so it doesn’t keep coffee as warm as some I’ve tested that do have this feature.
I tested it with small 500ml brew to challenge it with a worst-case scenario (larger brews will keep warm for longer) and the freshly brewed coffee started off at just over 78°C, but fell below 60°C after an hour or so. If you add milk that’s going to end up on the lukewarm side of things. It keeps temperatures near 70°C for around 30 minutes, but if you want hot coffee you have two options: drink it faster, or brew a full carafe every time to maximise heat retention.
To be fair to Fellow, this design does make the jug very easy to clean – much easier than the sealed designs I’ve come across. Both my Hario Stainless Steel Server and Sage Precision Brewer Thermal jug are fully sealed and retain temperature more effectively, but you need to dismantle them a regular basis for cleaning, or risk affecting the flavour of your coffee with sticky residue build up.
One final moan I have is over the decision to use two filter baskets. I get that these are designed to work best with smaller and larger doses of coffee, but they present problems. For one thing, the 8-12 cup paper filters required for the larger blue basket aren’t readily available in local supermarkets. They are widely available online, but on the odd occasion I ran out, it was annoying that I couldn’t just pop to a local supermarket and stock up.
The other issue with the baskets is that it’s not immediately clear why you’d use one or the other, unless you’ve read the manual first. Given that most filter coffee machines use cone-shaped baskets, I think unsuspecting members of your household may end up wondering why they keep on ending up with 450ml of overly strong coffee.
Fellow Aiden: Should you buy one?
The key to the Fellow Aiden’s success is how seamlessly it serves the needs of both beginners and experts alike. While rivals such as the Sage Precision Brewer Thermal seek to provide greater control over the brewing process, they rely on users knowing what they’re doing. The Fellow Aiden, on the other hand, is as adept at leading beginners by the hand as it is handing the controls to the connoisseur.
You might think, too, that adding an OLED display and Wi-Fi to a filter coffee machine was an over-engineered recipe for bitter frustration, but for the Fellow Aiden it’s transformational. The brilliant interface and slick app allows roasteries and coffee lovers to step into your kitchen and share their perfect brewing settings, and regular firmware upgrades allow the Aiden’s potential to grow.
The Fellow Aiden is expensive, but for good reason: it’s the best filter coffee machine there is. Feed it with great, freshly ground coffee, and you’ll never look at a cup of filter coffee in quite the same way ever again.
