Personally, I couldn’t live without a filter coffee machine. Grind some fresh coffee, pour in some filtered water, and minutes later there’s a big batch of delicious coffee to sip throughout the morning and afternoon. The Fellow Aiden, however, has made me realise what I’ve been missing: it’s no exaggeration to say that this machine has made some of the finest filter brews I’ve ever tasted. Here’s why I think it’s one of the best coffee machines around.
In a nutshell
The Aiden’s secret? Control. Do you like powerful dark roast coffee? Then you need a lower brewing temperature to stave off bitterness. How about exotic light roasts? A higher temperature, perhaps a slower pour to eke out all the sweetness and floral complexity. Cold brew? A hot bloom followed by 90 minutes at a slow, steady drip.
If this all sounds far, far too confusing, then rest assured that you don’t actually have to know what you’re doing: you can sit back while the Aiden dons its barista apron and takes charge. Add coffee and water, and it takes just two taps of the dial to start a brew. If you crave simplicity, it’s just as straightforward as the two-buttoned Moccamaster KBG Select at the other end of my kitchen counter.
If, however, you want to get deep into the settings and tweak every possible setting, adjusting temperature degree by degree, and timing every pulse of hot water to the second, you can. And if you don’t like the idea of attempting that on the little OLED screen, you can do it all via the excellent Android and iOS Fellow app.
Unlike some high-end rivals, the Aiden isn’t content to merely brew very good coffee. It’s designed to brew the best. And during my time with it, that’s exactly what it did, leading me to think it deserves a place among the best filter coffee machines.
Product specs
- Water capacity: 1.5 litre
- Hotplate: No (Thermal carafe)
- Weight: 4.4kg
- Size: (H)305mm x (W) 227mm x (D)227mm
- Warranty: 2 years
Unboxing and first impressions
The Aiden cuts a strikingly modern dash on the countertop. The design is a marriage of simple, stark contrasts. The body is ruler-straight minimalist lines and 90-degree angles. The thermal jug, softly rounded with not a hard edge in sight.
On the bottom left there is a single, round, clickable dial. Plug the Aiden in, and directly above, a bright, vivid circular OLED display glimmers into life. It’s all impeccably stylish. And if black isn’t your thing, hopefully matte white is as those are your only two options.
Peer around the side and you’ll notice the removable water tank. This is made from clear plastic, and has a 1.5 litre capacity clearly divided into 150ml increments.
The tank sits perfectly flush with the edges, and a handhold is moulded into the top edge to make it easier to lift out and put back into place. There’s no internal water filter, though, so if you have hard water, you’ll need to use a water filter jug to slow the limescale build-up.
Look underneath the Aiden and the metre long mains cable can be shortened as required by wrapping it around the integrated cable tidy. No, you don’t have to put up with trailing cables on your worktop.
Flip open the top lid, and the design is a little different to most. You get two colour-coded plastic baskets, both of which use paper filters.
For brewing 450ml or less, you use the cone-shaped basket with a size 2 filter. For larger brews, you use the flat-bottomed basket with an 8-12 cup filter. Neatly, a little colour-coded rotary switch inside the lid adjusts the shower head to make sure the water wets the coffee evenly in each of the two baskets.
Like most filter coffee machines, the flat basket has a non-drip valve which only releases the coffee when the carafe is in place. The cone basket has no valve, however, so you can swap out the carafe and brew directly into a mug or travel cup, if you prefer.
There’s no hotplate here – the Aiden relies on its stylish thermal jug to keep coffee warm after it’s brewed. This, it has to be said, is one aspect of the Aiden’s design which could be improved. Whereas several thermal jugs I’ve encountered have a valve to automatically seal and open the spout when pouring, the Aiden’s spout is always open. This means it pours beautifully, something other self-sealing jugs often don’t, and it’s simple to clean – again, something that others aren’t – but it doesn’t retain heat as effectively as others. I’ll discuss this in more detail shortly.
What’s it like to use?
When it comes to brewing coffee, the Aiden is as simple or as complex as you want it to be. But if your greatest concern is that it’ll be too daunting for less obsessive members of your household, then don’t be.
For starters, the tiny little user guide is excellent. There’s no fluff, no filler – just brief, useful advice on how to use the basic settings, clear illustrations, and a little sage advice thrown in for good measure. Other brands should take notes. This is what a user guide should look like in 2025.
If you’re too busy to read, though, then the Aiden’s Instant Brew option is only two clicks away. Click the dial once to wake the machine, and again to select Instant Brew. As long as there’s water (and coffee) in the machine, the Aiden starts brewing.
Use the cone-shaped filter and the Aiden brews anything up to 450ml of coffee. Use the flat-bottomed basket, and it’ll brew up to 1.5 litres. One nice touch is that you can set a preset brew type for the Instant Brew mode if you go into the settings and enable the Advanced mode. You can select from light, medium or dark roast profiles and set how much coffee you want to brew so it won’t empty the whole water tank.
The Guided Brew option gives you a little more control. Here you can set the type of roast, or select cold brew, and set exactly how much coffee you want to brew. Simply twist the dial back and forth to adjust the brew size in 75ml increments ranging from 150ml to 1.5 litres.
Tap the dial again, and the display tells you exactly how many grams of coffee you need to add for each brew type. Tap it again and the brew begins. A countdown timer indicates how long you have to wait, along with a little description of the current brewing process. It’s neat, simple and very effective.
If you demand perfection, however, then the Aiden goes the extra mile by giving you a vast amount of control. The standard profiles for light, medium, dark roast and cold brew work very well indeed, but delve deep into the settings and you can create your own profiles for your favourite coffees, too.
One factor is bloom. This adjusts how much water is added to the ground coffee at the very beginning of the brew to allow CO2 and gases in the coffee to escape. This can improve flavour and reduce bitterness and the Aiden allows you to adjust bloom time, how much water it uses for the bloom process and the temperature of the water.
Another adjustment is how many pulses of water you use for each brew. This allows you to emulate a manual pour over technique, where you’d pour a certain amount of water over the grounds then let the water seep through before pouring another measure of hot water through. Again, the idea is to eke out all the good flavours, and achieve the perfect extraction – and the optimal flavour.
Even cold brew has dedicated settings. You can tweak the ratio of coffee to water and push the standard 90-minute process up to several hours if you prefer.
This fine level of control opens up interesting possibilities. Head over to Reddit, and you’ll find Aiden owners sharing their own carefully crafted profiles for specific coffees, varietals and roast types. Also, you’ll find that an increasing number of UK coffee roasteries are beginning to share their own optimised brew profiles for their filter-specific beans. In the US, the Fellow Drops coffee club gives you access to one-off coffees sourced from a variety of roasteries. These coffees then appear in the Guided Brew menu, where you can select the tailor made brewing profile. Hopefully something similar will come over to the UK – it’s a great idea.
You can also tweak all of the Aiden’s brewing profiles via the excellent Fellow app. This does make it much easier to adjust and check over the various settings – the Aiden’s small, round OLED screen is no match for a larger smartphone screen in this regard. And, brilliantly, you can also use the app to schedule a brew for when you want it. Set your preferred amounts and the app tells you which basket to use, how much coffee to add – both in grams and tablespoon measurements – and lets you set a ready time. If you like the idea of waking up to the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, it’s a godsend.
Of course, whichever brewing style you choose, you’ll still need to get the grind size just so to achieve the perfect flavour. If you want to use supermarket coffee, you can, of course, but this is a machine that needs to be used alongside a good quality grinder to be at its best. I tested it alongside a few of my go-to grinders, but mostly with Fellow’s own Ode Gen 2 grinder (which I ranked amongst the best grinders out there), and the results were consistently excellent.
As I mentioned earlier, the thermal jug is one of the weaker aspects of the Aiden’s design. Fellow’s reasoning for its open spout design is that there are no awkward – or impossible – to clean parts or valves. It’s a good point – the combined lid and seal of the Sage Precision Brewer Thermal’s jug need regular cleaning – but the thermal properties of Fellow’s jug suffer as a result.
Freshly brewed coffee starts at around 78C, although this does vary depending on the brewing temperature, and this falls down to around 75C after 10 minutes. After 20 minutes, the temperature reaches 71C; after 30 minutes, 67C, and then the temperature slowly falls to around 60C after an hour.
If you’re drinking coffee black, then this is drinkably warm if not outright hot, but if you prefer to add milk, you may need to heat the milk – or god forbid, pop your cup in the microwave if you want a really piping hot coffee.
Of course, the further benefit of the thermal jug is that the coffee doesn’t end up stewing on a hotplate, but other thermal jug designs – such as that of the Sage Precision Brewer – simply do a better job of keeping the coffee warm for longer.
What’s it like to clean?
The cleaning process for the Fellow Aiden is nothing out of the ordinary. Day to day cleaning entails wiping with a clean, damp cloth to remove sticky coffee residue. As you’ll be adding ground coffee to the baskets – and may occasionally find that the wet coffee grounds flow over the top of the paper filter if you’ve ground too finely – it is necessary to give it a good wipe after each brew.
Fellow advises users to hand clean the various parts – the shower head, jug, tank and so forth. If warm soapy water isn’t enough to remove the coffee residue in the jug, Fellow recommends Urnex’s Cafiza espresso machine cleaning tablets. Dissolve one of these in water, let it soak and then the residue should wipe off easily.
The Aiden will prompt you to descale it when necessary, and this is a three stage process which takes around 45 minutes. Fellow advises users to buy a “high quality biodegradable and phosphate-free coffee machine liquid descaler” – it recommends Urnex Dezcal descaling liquid, which is widely available online.
How does it compare to similar coffee machines?
Personally, I’d be torn between the Fellow Aiden and the Sage Precision Brewer. The Sage has just been superseded with a new model, the Luxe Brewer, which I’m looking forward to reviewing, but the existing model of the Sage has a lot going for it. It lacks the very fine control and adjustability of the Aiden, not to mention the regular software and feature upgrades, but it does have some trump cards up its sleeve: the easier to fill tank with integrated water filter, the better insulated carafe and the ability to brew nearly 2 litres at a time. And frankly, it’s more than adjustable enough for most coffee lovers.
I do also love the sheer simplicity of the Moccamaster KBG Select – this is another machine which has (up until now) had a permanent place in my kitchen – but once you’ve used a machine with adjustable temperature and bloom time, and realised how much more flavour you can tease out from a far wider variety of coffee, it’s hard to go back to a machine with a set brewing temperature. For those of us who prefer outright simplicity – and love the idea of having 20+ colours to choose from – I can understand if they end up choosing the Moccamaster, though. It’s a lovely thing.
Should you buy the Fellow Aiden?
While I’m no stranger to high-end filter coffee machines – in fact, Sage’s superb Precision Brewer Thermal (£259.95 via Sage) and the Moccamaster’s capable KBG Select (£249 via Amazon) have also been resident on my kitchen worktop in recent months – the Fellow Aiden’s design, flexibility and all-round quality has seen it become my go-to filter machine.
It’s the coffee enthusiast’s idea of what a filter coffee machine should be – but it’s a superb coffee machine for beginners and aficionados alike. Being able to brew directly into a mug or travel cup is a boon; the adjustability, constant software refinements and ability to share recipes is a game changer, and – when you just can’t be bothered to faff – it’s perfectly capable of brewing up a simple, gorgeous carafe of coffee in the mornings. Is there is room for improvement here and there? Yes, of course. But right now, this truly is as good as filter coffee machines get.
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