I make coffee using a stainless steel, double filter, 32 oz french press called the Espro P7. It’s a big improvement over conventional french presses — producing a cleaner cup and keeping coffee hot and insulated — but you may need to substantially alter your brewing process to obtain an equivalent cup of coffee, particularly if you are a bit finicky about coffee. Below are some tips

It brews more quickly

The P7 seems to need about 25 percent less time to extract equivalent flavors from a given amount of coffee than a conventional glass press. I hypothesize this is due to the insulated stainless steel walls keeping the water hotter during the brew process.

You may need a trick to keep the lid on during brewing

The P7 has a double filter exposed to coffee both below and on the side of the plunger. This innovative design is superior to a conventional flat, single filter at removing coffee bean particulate from your brew slurry, but occupies much more space in the press:

With a conventional press, the filter protrudes below the lid only perhaps 1 cm and it is no problem to keep the lid on while brewing by simply retracting the filter into an “up” position. With the P7, retracting the filter in this way creates perhaps 5cm+ protrusion, seriously limiting how full the press can be, particularly if you do not wish the grounds to be touched by the filter. In fact, I had trouble filling even to the “minimum” fill line in the beaker with the lid on and filter attached.

Nonetheless, you can brew the P7 to maximum capacity with the lid on by simply removing the plunger mechanism from the lid prior to the start of brewing. This involves unscrewing the filter from the plunger stem, perhaps five seconds of work (and something you do when cleaning anyway). Then remove the plunger stem. Then you put the lid on by itself. Then you attach the plunger and screw on the filter before brewing.

(In practice you don’t actually remove and re-attach the filter every time you brew. You just never put it on in the first place, after disassembling it to clean, then you attach it when it is time to plunge.)

There is no need to let the coffee fines “settle” after you plunge

With conventional french presses, some connoisseurs like to give 30-60 seconds after they plunge to allow fine particles that made it past the filter to settle on top of the filter as gravity pulls them down; this keeps them out of the dispensed coffee. The technique is suggested by (for example) James Hoffman and Tim Wendelboe. It is superfluous in the Espro P7 in my experience, so you can just skip that step.

(One exception: I have found more darkly roasted beans that are ground quite fine, for drip coffeemakers, can, in fact leave particulate that makes it past even the P7 filters. This is not an issue for me now since I have moved to a slightly coarser grind, see next section.)

You may want to adjust your grind settings

If you are still grinding your beans quite coarse for french press, buying a P7 offers a good excuse to experiment with finer settings, since the filters can handle finer grinds. You may find more desirable flavors are extracted from the coffee at finer grinds, and/or that brew time may be shortened.

Conversely, some people, per Wendelboe and Hoffman above, were already grinding finer for the french press than conventional wisdom has historically dictated, for example all the way down to drip coffee maker levels. They may find that the higher, more even brew temperature of the insulated P7 actually encourages them to go a couple of notches more coarse. This is because the hotter water in the P7 is extracting more flavor from the beans, and, for the same quantity of coffee and brew time as a conventional press, may produce bitter and overexacted coffee, particularly at fine grind settings.

Personally, I use a Baratza Encore burr grinder, and went from a setting of 15 (drip) with my Bodum to a setting of 21 (Chemex) with the P7. The Encore manual suggests a setting of 30-32 for french press, in keeping with traditional advice for conventional press filters.

Consider making more coffee in fewer batches

When I used a Bodum french press, I would make one cup of coffee at a time, three times per morning. This ensured that each cup was hot and properly extacted; the filter on a conventional press exposes too much of the used coffee grind to any liquid left in the beaker, in effect continuing some of the brewing process rather than properly holding the coffee.

With the P7, not only does the coffee retain more heat due to superior insulation, it is also much better sealed off from the coffee at the bottom of the pot. So now I make all three cups at once. It can take me an hour or two to dispense all the coffee and it remains very good.

A note: The P7 is actually bad at making small batches like a single cup of coffee. It retains so much brew under the filter compared to a conventional press that it is pretty inefficient to make a single cup. Espro makes smaller models if you want to make a single cup.

You will “waste” a bit more coffee

Even brewing a near full press of coffee at a time, the P7 seems a bit less efficient than my Bodum, Since the filter rides higher up the sides of the pot, per the picture above, it seems more volume is left outside the filter.

I intended to quantify this difference with a test, but unfortunately my Bodum pot shattered before I could do this. I can report that the P7 yields about 850ml of coffee when you brew 1100ml of water and 61g of coffee beans. Although this seems significantly less efficient than the Bodum, it is completely worth the slight extra waste, in my experience, to get the superior tasting coffee. The espro coffee tastes so much “cleaner” I can’t go back.

Bringing it all together: How I  brew

So given all the above this is specifically what I do to brew an excellent cup of coffee in a P7, in case anyone finds it useful. For context, my water is always 208F (via our trusty Zojirushi pot).

(Remove plunger rod and filter from lid per above if not already separate. I always leave mine separate after washing.)

Ensure the two filters, detached from the lid, are twisted and clicked together. This will make it faster to attach them later.

Grind 61g coffee at medium coarse (Chemex, 21 on Baratza Encore), put into P7 pot.

Put pot on scale, zero scale. Start count up timer.

Fill pot with 1100g (ml) of water, making sure to wet all grounds.

Put lid on pot.

At 1 minute 20 seconds, remove lid, stir grounds, re-attach lid.

At 2 minutes, remove lid, stir again, skim foam from top with a spoon (per Wendelboe in this video at 3:30).

Attach plunger to lid: Put plunger rod through lid, screw filters on to it.

At 3 minutes, place plunger + lid on top of press and press.

Dispense and enjoy coffee, returning to pot for more as needed. It stays pretty hot! In fact, I pour half cups initially in order to let the dispensed coffee cool more rapidly.

Notes

As you can see, I brew at a 1:18 coffee:water ratio, which works well for the beans I buy, which tend to be medium roast and relatively fresh.  I also prefer sweet flavors to bitter; based on what my local coffee shops serve, other folks seem to enjoy more bitter compounds and may like a richer ratio.

I also think finer grinds will probably work well with the P7, given (probably) some adjustments to the timings above, although some beans (darker roasts) seem to “shatter” more in the grinder into finer particles which can escape the P7 filter, and for those you may want to experiment with providing time for the grounds that make it past the P7 filters to settle.

At one point around 2010 I was researching and writing a book while working full time as a gossip blogger at a very fast-paced website. I was basically working both weekdays (on the blog) and weekends (on the book) and as the stress built I coped by making elaborate fatty foods, shaking increasingly esoteric cocktails, and watching the Big Lebowski, which had been something of a touchstone since I saw it as a fifth year senior at Berkeley.

The cocktails and the fatty food paired well with the Lebowski, and the newly invented iPad allowed me to combine these activities in bed, until my laughing and spilling woke up my wife one too many times and my little Lebwoski parties were banished to the couch.

Anyway the book was successfully published and the blogging job gave way to a slightly slower paced magazine/website job. After a breather I released some audio transcription software I had written during the book project. But I never got around to releasing a video I had made in the same period about the Big Lebowski. Until today.

It’s truly the work of a disturbed mind. While watching the movie literally dozens of times I was able to notice, despite the whisky sours and daiquiris and martinis and yes White Russians, that the filmmakers (Coen Brothers) repeated certain phrases and speech patterns a lot, seemingly strategically. This is, it turns out, a known tick of theirs, but I was curious the meaning, and threw myself into compiling examples of the repetition and reading books about the movie.

After I compiled enough examples in a text file I decided to begin splicing copies of those examples out of a digital copy of the film and smushed them together into a sort of rough “supercut” compilation. Then I spent months (very occasionally) obsessively editing and adding new clips to these supercuts. Then I would forget about the project for months or years, watch the last supercut, and make a new, better, version.

Anyway it looks like the last version I made, version 24, was done in January 2019, and the one before that was made in 2015. And it looks pretty good! If you really like the movie maybe give this compilation of repetition a watch, I think it builds and builds and toward the end you may find some examples you had not noticed before. Only 1 minute 48 seconds and pretty fast paced. Enjoy.

For centuries the cost of distributing information polarized publishing between books, which were comprehensive and timeless, and newspapers, which were essentially diffs of information in books. Centuries ago, as today, understanding a newspaper was impossible without a lot of background knowledge, although back then you were more likely to have this context, your leisure options and reading choices being quite constrained.

The cost of printing and distribution, and in particular the cost of books, constrained the availability of material that might bridge this gap and educate readers about topics that were both vital and complex  — information that was a bit timely and a bit deep, with a medium shelf life, neither entirely fresh nor perfectly comprehensive. This sort of information, with the potential to quickly educate the citizenry, particularly as society grew ever more complicated, tended to get published only when there was a particularly strong political or commercial imperative to justify the cost. Revolutionary era pamphleteers, door to door encyclopedia salesmen, and independent product guides like the Whole Earth Catalog come to mind. 

For some reason, 25 years into the age of widespread internet use, we have only begun to disrupt this paradigm. In fact, news has proliferated online, and in this medium tends to provide little to no additional background information as compared to print, offering an occasional hyperlink that provides precious little additional context, and mostly contemporaneous context at that (that is, news articles tend to link to other news articles or to press releases or the like). Many of the new information forms that have emerged online only serve to heighten the importance of news or even more ephemeral information: Aggregators like Reddit (adding only importance ranking and brief comments), social networks like Twitter and Facebook (heavy on opinion and personal moments), and the democratic cinema of YouTube (tending toward the viral and off-kilter). Books, meanwhile, seem to have changed very little online, although their digitization has made them more conveniently available, and, arguably, slightly widened the number of authors of which a given reader avails herself.

This state of affairs is odd, given that the web was created by a scientist with the specific complaint that “keeping a book up to date becomes impractical,” in particular when organiziing “general information about [nuclear] accelerators and experiments,” which would seem to envision a platform that accomplishes quite a bit more than circulating newspaper articles.

But if you’re attentive you can start to see examples of how the web can foster new forms of information that go further than news in educating citizens, providing a deeper understanding  on a range of topics before, or in the absence of, relevant books. To wit:

• Wikipedia - A resource that is both criminally underfunded and routinely underestimated but which nevertheless dominates both the Google results and reader mindshare for any given topic. Why? Because it takes the time to go deeper (and thus more educational) than news; because it organizes by topic rather than by what recently happened; and because it has relentlessly honed a useful system for harnessing the work of a distributed team of volunteers (the sort of work news organizations would be wise to engage in more often).
  
  
• StackOverflow - A network of sites that has brought about nothing short of a revolution in how software engineering knowledge is exchanged. The site was consciously designed (per the podcast made by its creators as they created it) to foster knowledge with a considerable shelf life, information that for months or years would surface on Google to help programmers looking for solutions to their challenges. The system of software, rules, and human moderators used to make this happen is so consciously attuned to this goal that it is routinely criticized for being so strict as to border on unwelcoming. And at times the site fails to keep pace with the rapidly churning world of software libraries that have become central to applied computer science. But no one has argued that StackOverflow failed to achieve its primary goal. Its business model, the last time I checked, revolved around helping tech companies hire engineers.
  
  
• Wirecutter - A site that creates product guides with a shelf life of approximately one year and which has changed how many people buy things online. Wirecutter has become so widely used and imitated that it’s easy to forget that this format had to be invented, and invented at that by Brian Lam, who as editor of Gizmodo had overseen the production of a great many reviews with much narrower scope and a much shorter shelf life. After he retired from Gizmodo to Hawaii he made a site with a much more laid back pace and, relatedly, with more depth and educational value per article.
  

I think we are going to see more sites that fit this general mold — medium shelf life, between books and articles; greater depth and educational value than news articles, but less than books; relying more on expertise and less on reporting. This is the part of the web, and of publishing, and of the digital world, that really excites me right now. It is where we as a society are going to heal some real systemic weaknesses and build some real strengths. And how we will finally end the tyranny of news.

Before she died last month, Renée French was a nurse at New York Presbyterian Columbia Hospital. At some point before that, she rendered an unforgettable performance in downtown indie film icon Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes as herself, or at least a version of herself with the same name, leafing through a gun magazine in a restaurant. She was poised and smoldering, gracefully insisting, to a persistently helpful waiter, that she be left alone to simply drink her coffee. “I really wish you hadn’t done that,” she says at one point, as he pours an unsolicited refill. “I had it the right color, the right temperature — it was just right.”

Coffee and Cigarettes was released in 2004, but French’s scene was shot some time during the preceding 18 years, during which Jarmusch filmed the movie’s 11 distinct stories. It’s not clear how much acting she subsequently did; IMDB lists just one other performance credit. Presumably, French might have found more work had her performance in Coffee been released sooner. (Jarmusch did try to do so, at one point reportedly nearing a deal to showcase the shorts on MTV before concerns about glorifying smoking scuttled things.)

After Jarmusch memorialized French on his Instagram, photographer Stephen Torton wrote about her recent life, saying in a comment, “Renee was a single mom and a front line nurse who died after months of near round the clock work.“ Another commenter wrote, “ She helped my mom when she was at her lowest during the peak of this pandemic. I’ll be forever grateful for her compassion and love for helping others.” French was a longtime New Yorker, and other friends remembered her working at and patronizing various downtown bars in the 1990s. “She cared about fellow humans,” one wrote. Jarmusch remembered her as “a truly rare and remarkable human being... kind, selfless, beautiful.”

It’s clear, in other social media posts, that French was grappling with the emotional toll of her work. At one point she wrote, as the pandemic waned, “I am struggling coming out of this ‘dream’.” Another time: “Just wanna have a few drinks and SLEEP.“

In the week and a half since I learned of French’s death, my thoughts have repeatedly returned to her. I saw Coffee for the first time maybe a month ago, part of a Jarmusch binge that began in March, as the city began its move indoors. In her work we see that peace is necessary for compassion, that providing solitude is as much an act of love as active care. I wish as a city and community we could have provided Renée with more of these things, and looking at what we together have gone through, and what many brave people have fought for, these last few days, I think they clearly are also needed by our most vulnerable citizens. Let people alone to live in peace, to care for others and to pursue happiness.