Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've owned handpresso and minipresso, tried staresso and many others... none of those actually produced real espresso. Strong coffee, that's what they put out and it's better than weak coffee if that's the alternative--but no more! Flair makes espresso as good or better than most home machines available, and for far less money! More impressively, it delivers the most reliable and consistent results you'll ever find with an espresso machine. The secret to it's success is its simplified design that makes preheating brewgroup easy by omitting everything superfluous to the process of making espresso. The human powered lever provides complete control of the extraction while it's occurring, creating the perfect feedback loop. If you ground the coffee too fine or tamped with too much force, you can still save the day (shot) albeit with some extra muscle--your pump machine would have just choked at this point. Now if you ground too coarse or didn't tamp well enough, you can ease up on the lever and still come in over 25 seconds of extraction. Preinfusion is a feature of high-end machines. The Flair can do that to! Just start the extraction slowly, with light pressure for the first 10-15 degrees of rotation on lever, pause for 2-5 seconds and then complete the 25-40 second in total extraction as usual. The maintenance on the Flair is so much easier than on a home machine. No backflushes or descales necessary! In most cases, poor extractions and bitter or rancid coffee is a result of a machine in desperate need of service. With the Flair you have direct access to all brewgroup parts making it easy to keep clean, ensuring it delivers smooth tasting espresso each and every time. For best results do the following: make sure to grind only FRESHLY ROASTED espresso beans to a FINE grind targeting extractions in the 25-40 second duration. TAMP roughly 17-18 grams of coffee loaded into portafilter with 30-40# of pressure (play with your bathroom scale to figure this out). Try a two-step process whereby you load portafilter to the top, tamp, then reload and tamp again making sure to leave room for dispersion screen. PREHEAT the cylinder and cup with rapidly boiling water. Brew only with water between 198-205 F (93-96 C) the cup too if you enjoy your espresso HOT. Darker roasts usually fare best when brew water is closer to 198F and lighter roasts closer to 205F. Setup the Flair close to the sink for easy clean-up, invert portafilter and blow from the side of spout to eject puck, alternatively knock puck out by tapping against a cutting board held over trash or dig the spent coffee out with finger or wooden spoon. If you are having a hard time removing the piston from cylinder, place plastic tamper upside down on counter and slide cylinder down on top until piston pops out. Do these things and you will be very happy with the Flair and find that it outperforms all portable and most home machines. If you're not getting a ton of crema in the cup, you're doing something wrong--re-read my instructions above! pro-tip: PREHEAT the cylinder a few times when using lighter roasts--higher temps are required for best results.