Amateur trying to get to next level : Coffee

I love coffee, it’s the highlight of my morning.

I’ve been using good beans from reasonable places, so I know when I get amazing lightly roasted beans, with a little chaff and that yummy savoury smell.

I had been using an Aeropress and a fake-burr shitty grinder. I moved to a new Baratza Encore and the grind quality/consistency (just looking at the puck) is soooo much better.

Good value for money really.

So now that I have reasonable ground coffee from good beans, I’m trying to be a little more scientific with my aeropress approach.

I looked at the world championship recipes, but they are a little out there for me at this point (highly coarse grind, refractometers, re-mineralising the water, etc).

So I’ve gotten to the point I feel I have a good recipe and wanted to sanity check it with the folks here:

• 1. I pre-wet and rinse the filter and aeropress, warm cups etc, water 94c/201f

• 2) I grind using the Encore at about a 12, makes nice fluffy, consistent ground coffee. This is also inline with their recommendation on their docs. Looks like this: https://imgur.com/F4UWcAc

• 3) I use about 16g of coffee, and initially add about 50g of water, leave for 25/30 seconds and agitate.

• 4) I add the rest of the water to the top of the aeropress (around 220g). <- Is this the “steep” phase?

• 5) After one more minute or so, I press slowly (I used to press fast and firm, but a lot of YouTube tells me slow), it takes about 30 seconds to press, but I find it works well.

So that’s it, overall about 2 mins, 30 second press, 1.5 min steep.

Any tips, anything stupid you guys see here?

p.s. I guess I’m asking because I didn’t know it was a good idea to press slowly a few days ago, and I’m using aeropress for about 3 years. Just looking for any other stupid things I’m doing.

I see lots of recipes suggest V60 style coarseness for aeropress but doesn’t make sense to me unless the steep time is 3min+.