I enjoy making my own cocktail bitters, which involves steeping things like herbs, roots, barks, rinds, and more in high-proof alcohol for a few weeks, and then straining the mixture. The filtration of loads of teeny, tiny particles has always been a slow part of the process (using gravity and cheesecloth, for example). Until now. I grabbed my AeroPress coffee maker and started using it as the high-pressure filtration piston that it really is.

Things like vanilla pod seeds and cinchona bark are a real pain to filter out, normally. You can see from this before and after photo of the paper filter in the AeroPress how much of the tiny particulate matter I’ve removed.

Ahh. Lovely, clear aromatic bitters.