The Flair Pro 2 Review - How Was I SO Wrong? 

I love my Pro 2. Im a truck driver and always take it with me, and almost every week I take it home. Nice quality. Although I travel a lot would never take it with me on my motorcycle trip or car trip or family vacation

A bit late to comment but I just discovered your channel. Great content! I did get the basic Flair, and after a ton of failures and discouragement, I upgraded to the Pro kit with the pressure gauge. At that point I was able to make proper coffee. It served a good purpose to teach me the basics of espresso, but the workflow is clunky and time-consuming. The fact that you have to take off the brew chamber to remove the portafilter is a big design flaw, and dealing with boiling hot chunks of metal to reset it gets old. It takes about 10 mins to make a cup of espresso from start to finish, which is a lot of time so I started to avoid it for my daily coffee. I like the manual workflow, but at this point I'd like to upgrade to something more efficient, and I'm staying away from anything that requires manual preheating. The Flair 58 seems like a good upgrade, but the heating mechanism seems like an afterthought. They missed the opportunity to boil the water to a given temperature, instead of just preheating the chamber. I'm leaning towards the meticulous which seems well-thought, but it has the risks of a 1st gen product.

My home espresso journey started with the Flair neo. It's been about a year now and I upgraded the basket to a non pressurized one, added the pressure gauge and bought a commandante. As I'm traveling, it's really nice to have the option to just take it with you. I agree with your point, that the community of flair makes it so easy to get good results. I think this has to do with the price as well. You get a flair for a relatively cheap price, so it's easily accessible for everybody and a lot of people using a machine, will create a group around it. Also Flair as a company offers some nice content on their website, not only about their machine, but about coffee in general. I think I will skip the Pro 2 and my next machine will probably be the 58, because I want the convenience of it, but the other flair will go in travels with me. Great Video, loved hearing your explanation.

I bought the flair a few days ago, and its coming in the mail today so i am looking forward to it immensely! This will be my first espresso machine, and i am very proud that at 15 I am well on the way to becoming a coffee nerd. I also love the look of it, and the fact it is portable!

When i can afford it, i plan to get into espresso via the flair. It just seems so fun being able to have control over almost every variable of the process. It's like the mechanical transmission of espresso! Also, i kept thinking that swaying plant in the back window is steam or smoke rising😅

Best workflow tip : use the botom of a 6 cups moka pot with a bit of water in it. Then put the chamber above to preheat with the vapor. I also add the moka filter on top, then my actual espresso cup. Sounds complicated, but in practice it takes 10 seconds to setup, both your cup and chamber will be close to 100°C.

Thanks for the review. I ordered a refurbished Pro 2 unit from Flair today.

Thanks for the review. About to buy it.

Great review! Looking forward to seeing your review of the Ascaso Steel Duo

I snagged the 58 during their fathers day sale and it has been a massive improvement from my BBP. Whenever i get the urge to upgrade some time in the distant future, it'll have to be a machine with pressure profiling.

Great review, maybe keep the BG music down a bit.

I like the idea of how it’s built and the add ons that come with it as your passion grows for a more perfect espresso. I’d like to know what you think about the WACACO Picopresso?

Great review man!! Still going with my Aeropress for camping though and my little (soon to be updated) Breville Bambino plus at home ☕️

I have a Linea Mini with a bit lower pressure (usually set to 6-8.5 bar). It makes good spro to be sure. But my Flair definitely makes better spro, at least if you're looking to get clean, clear results. I tried a Robot for the first time the other day. Outstanding shot as well, unsurprisingly.

how much pressure bar the pre-infusion needs?

I don t care about its look but I find it looking so great so it is a plus. I want for it because of all the good reviews on it. I had an automatic expresso machine that I bought for 800 buck that was keeping failing on me and cost me 140 buvks for every repair... I wanted something robust that would never fail again and last long....very very long. I went for the Flair Pro 2 and the Flair Royal Grinder. 500 bucks in total, but it will last forever. You can experience and do Design of Experiment by playing with several vairables (grind level, infusion time, yield, pressure profiling, pressure tempering, total extraction time...) and pulling the best expresso shot for each of the coffee beans you have. Yes it takes time to make 1 cup (3 min if you have the boiled water ready), but it is an Art by itself. Relaxing ceremonial moment to enjoy a nice evening with your beloved wife or husband to celebrate the end of a hard day of work. Bring it everywhere you want and you ll have your nice, tasty, creamy expresso. 500 bucks...it is a no brainer! To same time, I bought assay tubes in which I filled pre weighted coffee beans. I have a nice wood tube holder and I can quickly prepare up to 6 expresso in a raw. Or you can stick to your Nespresso machine...but in that case, you are not experiencing a true coffee until you start the real deal with machine similar to the Flair, or the equivalent but automated ones.

Took some time to Get used to, but i still love it, Tons of fun trying deferent profiles, and its kind of a meditating thing to turn phone on silent and do the ritual of manual espresso, Even better/needed alonetime after i became a father of two 😂😂

Great production quality. You should have more subs than you do. Love the review! :)

After 7 years of espresso with semi-automatic machines, I wanted to improve my skills and learn how to operate a manual direct lever machine. So I bought the Flair Pro 2 as a 2nd machine, while I still have my main (pump) machine, the Quickmill Carola. I love the Flair Pro 2, even though obviously the entire workflow is time consuming. But I realize that after some time I will sort out the most effective way to get everything done. For example I already figured out that for me (I'm doing classic italian dark espresso) prefilling the chamber 1x is completely sufficient. I love how it feels to make espresso with this machine. It's really absolutely manual and I can control every little detail with the lever. I can do things like pre-infusion which aren't even possible with the Carola. And it goes way beyond that. On the other hand, the Carola will still be my reliable and quick-and-easy espresso before my morning commute - the flair process is way too complicated for a workday morning...

Hi, I am looking to get into the world of espresso and was just wondering apart from the size is there any difference between the PRO2 and the neo (with pressure gauge and bottomless porter filter)? Would you get that much better espresso out of the PRO than the upgraded neo and if so why?

Is there a coffee like illy or similar that would provide a pre-ground coffee that’s ground correctly to work in the flair? I know it’s not ideal but I’d like to use a pre-grind sometimes.

I love my flair pro2, but wish it were easier to disassemble the group head when it's at temperature. I burn easily and find it fairly painful to pull back to back shots on, especially separating the portafilter from the group head.

Other than the rubber grip (which I'm not a fan of), does the construct of the main body of the pro2 differ to the one on the classic in any way? material wise I mean

I love my flair pro 2, but now thinking upgrading to the 58, because of thermal management mostly.

Can you upgrade the Neo/Pro 2 to the 58, or is that a separate machine altogether?

And to make milk based drinks, what should one get to steam/froth the milk?

Are there any plastic parts in contact with liquid?

I want a manual espresso machine, but I cant choose beteeen the flair pro 2 and the Cafe Robot. For me the price difference is only 50 bucks. What would be your advice? For me the durabality of the machine and the amount of control at the espresso are the most important

Is there some advantage of having this one in from regular espresso machines like delonghi or breville with 300-700 price range? We do not consider any extra, only making espresso.

I'm new to espresso stuff, and I know from my little knowledge that this is for that specific purpose, but wanna ask is it possible to vary the water ratio of this machine? I got this habit of enjoying my coffee for a little bit longer, sipping it for like 5-10minutes. So the amount of finished product in your demo is way too small for me.

請問台灣何處購買

Can you froth milk?

Wanna have this too ❤

I love that the cap is gone

6:33 I don't feel the need to preheat on a Cafelat Robot. The thermal mass is small enough not to need it.

Flair gives me a good 1st cup espresso better than many other espresso machines. However, making the 2nd, 3rd,.. continueously are not that easy.

The best thing about flair is less need to do maintenance

flair 58's sticking out cables are a bit turn off.

design is weak IMO, but I do like the idea of having this kind of control

I got better with espresso with Flair Pro2. Though I now feel ready for a semi auto ( and saving for it ), PRO2 will definitely stay. It helps too, to have a wdt tool but i think a gamechanger for me was my Crema distributor and tamper ( 2 in 1 ) tool made for Pro2. Since then, I have been making beautiful, great tasting shots. I guess, once you have a semi auto, it will be a nice break to use manual once in a while. Anyway coffee cheers, espresso drinkers!

“What was I missing about the Flair 52? Well, it happens to have this pressure gauge not found on espresso machines” How did you miss the pressure gauge?

Let's get the history straight. Cafelat Robot had a pressure gauge from the beginning, before Flair. But gauges for manual espresso makers were a thing years before both, like on the EspressoForge and Portaspresso.

Oioioi, just because the coffe landscape is incredibly stupidly expensive, that doesn't make a 300+€ metal press with a pressure guage "cheap". It's like with bicycles, you can get them which cost as much as a whole ass motorcycle, sure pelaton level equipment, but 14k is 14k. And so is 300 buckaroos. In comparison to getting coffee outisde, 300 bucks are easily back in the pocket if you get one of these. But realistically you're only looking at a hand full of cast iron bits, which are painted, some plastic bits and bobs and that pressure guage, which is also not really expensive to make.

Haven’t managed to get a shot without some sourness yet… I’ll keep trying…