Review: Oxo Rapid Brewer

I am holding in my hand what for a moment feels like the holy grail. But mostly I'm a little confused. Somehow, the new Rapid Brewer from Oxo has done something I've declared impossible many times over: It has made actual good-tasting cold brew in five minutes.

The promise of fast cold brew has been made so many times I've taken to ignoring it: It's pretty much always a lie. I've tried north of a dozen cold-brew devices this past year, and the WIRED Reviews team has tripled this number going back to 2017. Over and over, every device offering “instant cold brew” is wrong or different or a separate substance called iced coffee, or maybe even actually terrible. Cold brew, by its nature, takes time: anything from a few hours to a full day.

But New York–founded kitchen brand Oxo already makes my favorite traditional cold-brew maker. So if Oxo is making promises, I listen. The Oxo Rapid Brewer, released last autumn, is a little multipart device with a hand pump, a water reservoir, and a tight-tamped coffee reservoir—designed to use hand-pumped air pressure to push water through a tight espresso-like puck of coffee grounds. It costs a mere $40, and it's small enough to take on a hike. Worth a try, I figured.

And so I ground a whopping 40 grams of medium-roast coffee to a super-fine, nearly espresso-like grind and tamped it into the device's coffee reservoir like a thick quad-shot puck. I poured a standard American coffee cup into the reservoir I'd screwed up top, and then I waited five minutes before pumping air pressure into the water chamber.

And lo, a delicious dark elixir showered into the waiting cup. Well, actually it more kinda dribbled, like water through a leaky roof. But anyway, the result was about 4 ounces of genuinely credible cold-brew concentrate—ready to be diluted with milk or ice water into a morning drink. The coffee had released its natural sweetness and a whole lot of flavor.

Among all instant-ish cold brew I've tried, this tasted the most like traditional cold brew, the stuff that takes 12 or 24 hours to make. Wild stuff!

Oxo Is (not) My AeroPress

So, how does this thing work? Well, it's hard not to notice similarities between the Oxo Rapid Brewer and another multipart plastic tube of a brewer that … also uses hand-applied pressure to brew coffee quickly.

Indeed, when she saw the device, an editor asked excitedly, “Is this an AeroPress from Oxo?” It is absolutely not, replied Oxo's reps emphatically when asked this very question.

“Unlike the AeroPress, where the coffee and water are fully mixed and agitated before filtration, the Rapid Brewer’s process focuses on pressure-driven extraction through the coffee bed,” went the response, filtered through the anonymizing power of emailed public relations. “The resulting concentrate is bold and flavorful, with our cold brew in particular reaching extraction levels that are difficult to achieve with other brewing methods.”

Indeed, the process is a bit different. Basically, the AeroPress is like a French press that's been hand-pumped through a filter, with a bit of pressure to aid extraction. The Oxo? It's more like a combination of Kyoto-style slow-drip and espresso. But also hand-pumped.

For five minutes, water dribbles through a shower filter into a thick, tamped coffee puck, working its way slowly through the puck but releasing very few drops. Only when I start hand-pumping is the water pushed more quickly through the puck, dribbling out over the course of another minute or so: The air in the chamber reaches higher than one bar, about double what you'd usually expect from an AeroPress but still way less than the nine bars needed to qualify as espresso.

The resulting cold brew concentrate benefits from pressurized extraction, sure. But also, super-fine grounds aid faster extraction. Using a boatload of coffee grounds also means a greater bulk of flavor compounds is extracted.

The device manages to coax out a surprising amount of sweetness, especially with roasts that lean caramelly and medium-dark. And in such a short time span, it produces a satisfyingly full-bodied and full-flavored drink, ready to be diluted with ice or milk. In side-by-side testing, the results were significantly better than fast cold brew made with an AeroPress.

Some Don’t Like It Hot

But a lot of caveats are in order.

Is the cold brew produced by the Rapid Brewer as complex and sweet and smooth as a 12-hour cold brew? No, it's absolutely not. The Rapid Brewer is a fast but blunt instrument, extracting sweetness and full body but not quite all of the flavor. And using the right roast matters a lot. While my first attempt with the brewer yielded cold brew so delicious I thought my senses had gone haywire, subsequent attempts with different beans showed limitations.

Light roasts, in particular, came out underextracted to the point of sour: don't go below medium with this one. Too dark, you risk some bitterness. This really is a somewhat finicky balance you're striking. (For the record, my initial success came with a medium-roasted Stumptown Colombia single-origin: have fun.)

You're also using a whole heck of a lot of beans for each mug of cold brew: 40 grams of coffee for four ounces of concentrate, enough to make 12 to 16 ounces of drinking-strength cold brew once diluted, according to OXO's instructions. (Though, note I had good results with the lowest level of dilution.) By comparison, I'd expect to use less than half that if making 10-ounce mug of drip coffee. The portion you're using for the Rapid Brewer is also more than I'd generally use for traditional cold brew that involves patience and forethought.

As a daily driver, this Rapid Brewer would quickly become expensive. Which is all to say, this is not a cold-brew maker of first resort. It is, rather, a magic trick to be reserved for hiking, camping, or mornings at home when long-extracted cold brew is not available.

I haven't said much about hot brew as of yet, but the Rapid Brew will indeed also produce hot coffee, if you use about half as much coffee and steep for only 2 minutes. But I don't see as much use for the hot-coffee side of the equation.

First off, this Rapid Brewer produces its hot coffee in concentrated form, meaning you'll then have to dilute your hot coffee with more hot water after brewing or it'll be bitter and strong, but definitely not espresso. Second, the hot brew isn't much faster than any other method of brewing hot coffee, and the results are also not as complex or aromatic as an AeroPress or a good drip brewer. Fine for camping, I guess.

But that said, as with the AeroPress it kinda resembles, user experimentation will eventually determine what works and doesn't work with the Rapid Brewer. I've started messing around with different doses, and I even tried running water twice through coarser grounds, with surprisingly OK results. What made the AeroPress popular was not the original AeroPress recipe; it was the opportunity to goof around with it and come up with one's own ideal result.

In the meantime, this Oxo Rapid Brewer offers a palatable and quite economical home solution to a sudden need for cold brew—the only such solution I know. And when you need coffee, you always need it fast.

Correction: 05/14/25, 5 pm EDT: An earlier iteration of this piece mis-stated the volume of cold brew made by the Oxo Rapid Brewer after dilution. It is 12 to 16 ounces, when following manufacturer instructions. The copy has been changed to reflect this.