I had the same result. If I use the Aeropress ‘as instructed’, I get half a mug of light brown water before I press.
So instead I flip it upside down, brew in the cylinder, screw on the top, and flip it onto my mug to press.
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I never managed to make that bad a mess, even when I nearly poured boiling water all over myself…
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Seems like they could put a grip flange on the top of the female portion. The biggest problem with the “weak cup” method is shooting the thing right out of your gripping hand. I wonder if someone sells a snap-on handle that would interface with the bottom of the press. That should be relatively easy to fabricate.
I too, have forgotten to put a filter in. And it looked like that.
Once.
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I know this is risky, but you could… turn it upside down. Bam, grip flanges instead of rest-on-the-cup flanges.
But pressing a liquid out of a filter that’s aimed skyward is going to end poorly for everybody.
The flange exists on the egress side of the cylinder so it can accept the filter and plate, so it’s not just reversible from that standpoint.
You can fit the plunger in either end when the filter is off, but you can’t make coffee without the flange.
Make a flange on both sides, and it might be easier to hold, sure.
Or just live with shitty coffee in the hotel room, or splurge the $4 because you didn’t plan ahead.
a pure Archimedes screw won’t work because you need pressure- you’re not just raising water from one level to another, you’re trying to force it through a medium, and besides, a screw would be stirring the grinds up so crazily it’d be nuts.
Who is doing that? Last I checked, upside down users flipped it over, at the end, before they pushed the plunger to force the liquid out.
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Right, but at that point you’re right-side-up, and you have Flanges resting on the cup, not grip flanges?
Ah, I missed you were responding to someone else’s horrible idea. 
team inverted aeropress 4 lyfe, just because it’s way cleaner for me.
(not flavor differences.)
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I’ve never done it but I have an areopress so old that it doesn’t even look like what they sell these days (not smoky with big words on the side). Maybe I should.
Threads don’t really work for a pump unless you are A) working against gravity only, like with an Archimedes screw, which we aren’t, or B) can rely on significant resistance force against the outside of the screw housing (the tube). In most cases, this force is generated by having counter-threads or linear ridges molded or cut onto the inside of the housing. You can see them on this exploded parts shot:
These ridges allow something for the meat/auger system to push against, and, then, since the auger is constrained, the force balance results in forward motion of the meat.
The problem with doing this with water is that water has almost zero viscosity compared to meat. Put simply, viscosity (“thickness” or resistance to flow. Think maple syrup or molasses) allows the force acting on the meat to push the meat forward, before the meat can re-arrange itself and spend that force on creating eddy currents. Lower the viscosity, and most of the force goes into swirling the water instead of moving the mass of water forward. This is why propellers in water have to turn pretty fast, and why almost all swimming animals use flippers or fins instead of propellers, because fillers and fins are much more efficient at low speed.
So, we could use a screw/propeller to force the water through, but we’d probably have to turn up the speed to a point where it would be 1) annoying, 2) messy, and 3) hard to power by humans.
You might be able to do something clever with a scroll compressor setup:
But you’d have to mix really fine air bubbles into the water, because it’s incompressible.
Actually, come to think of it, the Aeropress is actually pretty amazing, and simple. I’m gonna go grab a cup of coffee!
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How would you get the rubber plunger in there past the threads without messing up the sides of it with scratches?
Or, if you design a plunger with gouges in it to allow the threads to pass, how do you deal with the added friction against it from rotating against the plug of coffee grinds?
What if it gets misaligned? Then you have coffee shooting up past the threads and into your face.
When I do what you described, I do not grab onto the body of the thing. Instead, I use my hands like clamps, with fingertips under the flange of the body and thumbs/thumb area pressing the plunger top. Two hands together is sufficient to squirt out the coffee. And yes, I make a smaller batch because my hands can’t reach both ends if the thing were fully extended.
@doctorow I am not messing around, contact OneDropDesign (most famous for high end precision yoyos). Ask for Shawn, and discuss your idea. They may be close to max production capacity, but Shawn and David are two of the most creative, capable, kind people in American manufacturing you could ever meet.
Solving this problem is so up their alley it is uncanny. I am happy to make introductions if you want to talk about your ideas and frustrations with current coffee technology.
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there must be a way to finesse this?
There is. It’s called a drip machine.
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Interesting that neither Cory nor any of the commenters seem to have noticed that some spell-checker replaced “thread” with “threat” twice. Sign of the times?
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I do it exactly like the second video there (minus the chopstick), though wow, he uses a lot more coffee than a standard Aeropress scoop.
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