Flair Espresso Maker - Manual Press

Product Information

I think either Rok or Flair is a great coffee maker to have either for home (as long as you're happy heating and frothing your milk via other methods, or if you don't drink milkies), and/or for making espresso while travelling. But the important question is: Which is the best non-powered lever style manual Espresso maker, Rok or Flair Espresso?

I'm not saying Flair is difficult to use, but there's less to do with Rok, you don't have to assemble it, you don't have to put the brew head and the cylinder together, you don't have to put in the piston, you just dose the portafilter and insert it as you would with a powered Espresso machine, and then pour in the water. You can choose to start by pressing down slightly just to saturate the bed of coffee (it’s already been saturated just by the weight of water sitting above it, but adding a bit of lever pressure will fully saturate the puck), or you can just start applying constant, firm pressure (around 30-40lbs of arm pressure) to start the shot flow.The Flair Classic out of the original Flair Espresso series is the model that shook the coffee world with its manual solution to espresso making. So I got in touch with ROK again to ask whether the ‘GC’ parts kit solved their materials-led problems. The Flair Classic is the original manual espresso maker that turned the craft coffee industry on its head in 2016. Are you bored with the widely available domestic coffee brewing methods but don’t want to spend a fortune on a domestic espresso machine?

There's not a huge amount in it to be fair, maybe 20-30 seconds worth, but still, I think the Rok is a bit easier to use in general than Flair.More than that, and your espresso isn’t so “veloce” in the AM – you could be spending upwards of 30 minutes just to get three or four shots (once you include water heat up time, brew chamber cleaning, etc).

In other words, after using it for grinding a lot of coffee, you may find that you need to adjust these a bit finer.Variants of this brewing device have been around since 2004, when it was first introduced as an ESE espresso pod brewing device. We offer a number of additional options to enhance your brewing experience, including an extra portafilter and brew head to brew consecutive shots without cleaning first.