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Roasting Coffee at Home: A Beginner’s Guide

Jeff Walcott — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 16:56:06 +0000

Have you been curious about what it takes to be your own coffee roaster, and how to start roasting coffee at home? We’re going answer those questions and much more in this article!

Let’s start by addressing the most basic question: Why roast your own coffee at home? There is certainly no shortage of delicious commercially roasted coffee available on the market. Well, you could be living in an area of the world where fresh roasted, specialty coffee is difficult to come by. Maybe you’re looking for a deeper connection to the coffee you brew. Or maybe you simply find the three times savings of buying green (unroasted) coffee compelling.

In any case, home coffee roasting can be fun and rewarding. It’s also easier and less expensive than you probably think. Now, you won’t be giving commercial roasters a run for their business any time soon, but you’ll definitely be roasting enjoyable coffee and impressing your friends in no time.

Which Coffee Roaster is Best for Home Roasting

Let’s talk about selecting the home coffee roaster that is right for you. Roasting coffee on the most basic level can be accomplished by spreading raw, green coffee across a pan and baking them in the oven, browning them in a skillet, roasting them in a colander over a heat gun, or the barbeque. But of all the rudimentary ways to roast, perhaps the easiest to get started with is a popcorn popper. Out of the box, though, popcorn poppers offer little to no control over variables such as temperature and airflow, and they send chaff flying everywhere.

There are so many great home coffee roaster options on the market, and there are new ones popping up frequently. Here are some of our recommendations at different price points:

Popper from Sweet Maria’s ($90) – This is a much better budget option than a traditional popcorn popper as it decouples heat and fan speeds allowing you to make adjustments on the fly. It also has a chaff collector, saving you from having to clean up a big mess after you roast.
Hive Roaster ($75) – This coffee roaster is a skillet designed to be shaken in circular motions over a heat source to agitate and evenly roast the coffee.
Fresh Roast 540 or 800 ($209-289) – These are great options if roasting at home seems like something you’ll stick with. Like the popper, these are fluid bed roasters using convection to heat the beans. They offer a higher capacity though, as well as more control.
Behmor 2000AB Plus ($479) – The Behmor is a drum roaster that not only gives you the option to roast manually, but also comes with pre-programmed profiles. Another nice feature is the exhaust fan. A properly ventilated roasting chamber will keep smoke buildup inside from ruining your roast.

A wide array of home coffee roasting options are available on the market – just be sure to do your research both on the manufacturers’ websites as well as on the various roasting forums online before pulling the trigger on a home roaster.

At this point in your home coffee roasting journey, the choice will probably come down to your budget, and how much coffee you need roasted each time. On that note, know that roaster manufacturers tend to exaggerate. As a rule of thumb, count on the best roasts happening with batches at least 30% below whatever they say their product is capable of. Also remember that measurements are based on the weight of green coffee going in. By the time you are finished roasting, the coffee will have lost between 12-21% of its weight, depending on how dark you roast your coffee. Do some quick math and consider the coffee consumption in your household. How often will you have the time to roast? Are you ok with roasting a couple batches back to back, or do you want it all finished in one go?

Picking a Fluid Bed or Drum Coffee Roaster

Another consideration is the type of roaster you choose, and how quickly it is able to transfer heat. Fluid bed coffee roasters transfer heat fast and efficiently, and their roast times can end up being as short as 4-6 minutes, typically finishing in under 9 minutes. The long end for fluid bed coffee roasting happens to be on the short end for drum roasters which transfer heat slower. The typical 10-minute roast in a drum roaster might progress as follows: Paling at 3 minutes, yellowing at 4 minutes, browning at 5 minutes, first crack at 8 minutes, about 2 minutes of development, dropping at 10 minutes.

Coffee Roasting Terminology and What it Means

Let’s cover some of the basic terminology of coffee roasting.

Charging – to load your roaster with green coffee.
Charge Temperature – the start or preheat temperature of your roast.
Batch Size – the amount of green coffee being loaded.
Drying Phase – the first third of the roast that is spent evaporating the moisture inside the beans.
Browning Phase – the middle third of the roast, where the more interesting caramelization and Malliard reactions occur. These reactions are responsible for a lot of the aromas present in roasted coffee.
First Crack – the chorus of beans bursting at their seams to release the buildup of water vapor they can no longer contain.
Second Crack – similar to first crack, but this time it is the buildup of Co2 that the beans can no longer contain. The sound is softer than the crackling during first crack, due to weakened and more brittle bean cell structure.
Development Phase – the last third of the roast, starting at the onset of first crack, and ending when you conclude the roast.
Dropping the Coffee – ending the roast by either literally dropping the coffee out of the roasting chamber and into a cooling tray, or in some roasters by turning off the heat and cranking up the fan to cool the coffee inside the chamber. If you don’t actively cool the coffee when it is done roasting, it will keep cooking or “coasting.” Ideally, you bring the coffee down to body temperature in as little as 4-6 minutes to prevent coasting.
Drop Temperature – the temperature at which you stop the roast

How to Source Your Green Coffee for Home Coffee Roasting

Once you sort out the coffee roaster that’s right for you, it’s time to start shopping for coffee to roast! You’ll find green coffee available across the internet. Be mindful when researching suppliers and understand that quality and standards run the gamut. Some of what is being sold to the consumer market may be what the commercial market has rejected.

Coffee starts to fade, no matter how carefully stored, within 6 months of harvest. Most transparent suppliers will list the arrival date of the coffee. If you’re not seeing that date posted, be wary and at least ask for more information. There are also green coffee defects which can be hard to spot at first glance, or before you have already roasted the coffee. Stick to reputable companies with a long track record and great reviews when starting out since you won’t be as practiced at spotting defects to know you’re being swindled.

Sweet Maria’s has been in green coffee business for more 25 years, and they have been publishing educational content for all that time! Their Coffee Library and YouTube channel are a treasure trove for budding roasters learning the ropes. Their green coffee listings include a wealth of information about the coffee being offered, its producer, the region it was grown in. They also share their cupping scores for each coffee, along with their roasting recommendations and an array of descriptors that make it easy for you to select the coffees that align most with your preferred brew method and your taste preferences.

The best you can hope for when roasting coffee is to highlight the intrinsic qualities of the seeds. If it’s an earthy, low acid coffee from Brazil or Southeast Asia, there’s literally nothing you can do in your roast to conjure up bright floral or fruity flavors. These attributes are a product of the terroir – the climate, soil, and elevation that they were grown, as well as the processing method used at the plant. Wet process, dry process, honey pulp natural, and wet hulled processes will all bring out different characteristics of the coffee.

If you’re wondering which origins to get started with, the following list highlights some of the general flavor characteristics of coffees from different continents/countries.

Earthy/Savory with muted acidity: (Asia) India, Java, Sumatra, Yemen [wet hulled process]
Chocolate/Nutty with medium or mellow acidity: Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Hawaii, Honduras, Jamaica [dry & wet process]
Sweet Fruit & Floral with crisp acidity: (Americas) Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru [wet & honey process and pulped natural]
Tart Fruit & Berry with bright and sparkling acidity: (East Africa) Ethiopia, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda [dry process]

How to Plan for Your Coffee Roast

It’s good to have a plan as you approach your roast. Are you focused on preserving origin characteristics in the coffee or do you want to introduce more of the roast flavors? Are you roasting a high elevation washed coffee or a low elevation natural? While the first can take high preheats and a lot of gas out of the gate, the second generally fares better with a lower and slower approach.

Another important consideration is whether you want your roasted coffee to shine as a filter brew, or as an espresso. The filter approach typically focuses on preserving acidity and origin characteristic while avoiding introducing roast flavors. The espresso approach, on the other hand, usually takes into consideration that it should perform just as well straight as when paired with milk or a dairy-free alternative. A little extra development will help to tame the acidity and add some mild roast flavors as well as body. This usually improves the chemistry with milk-based drinks.

If you’re roasting coffee with a popcorn maker, skillet or barbeque, you have only your sight and smell to tell you how much heat to apply, and when to cut it. Fancier coffee roasters may come with probes and software that can track and log, as well as calculate derivatives and percentages that help inform how the roast is progressing. You should definitely use all the available data your roaster provides, but don’t allow yourself to get so disconnected from the coffee or reliant on the technology, that if it were to all leave you at once, you wouldn’t know how to manage your roast.

As we think about managing our coffee roasts, it is important to note a couple of things we want to avoid. One of these is “baking” our beans in the roast. Roasts that progress too slowly, tend to stall or crash because not enough heat is applied at the right time to carry the roast into and out of first crack. These roasts can end up tasting baked (flat, papery, and grain like). We also want to avoid tipping and scorching our coffee in the roast. Tipping happens when the tips of the beans are roasting faster than the middle. This is usually because too much heat has been applied too fast. Scorching happens when the drum is too hot at the time you charge the roast, or you have overloaded the roaster and the beans are not able to mix quickly enough, leaving the beans in contact with hot surfaces long enough to char. It is also important to understand that while you might be having success with a certain batch size with one coffee, when you switch to a different coffee (that might be denser or larger), you might actually have to reduce the batch size to prevent overloading your coffee roaster.

Another thing that you generally want to avoid in coffee roasting is second crack. Ideally, you will only experience second crack once or twice, and only by accident. You should attend to the roast well enough to drop it prior to this moment. Second crack is where carbonization is occurring, and by that time you’ve roasted all of what makes the coffee unique out of it. The flavors that you will experience from coffee roasted to this point are heavy roast flavors like ash, smoke, and molasses. The oils within the beans have been driven to the surface, which leads to rancidity as the oils are exposed to oxygen.

To sum up this section, the basics of thinking through your roast are as follows: You apply heat to the coffee seed as fast and as evenly as possible, moving them through the three phases of drying, browning, and development, while avoiding roast defects along the way.

How to Analyze Your Coffee Roast

A good starting point can be to select a coffee you love from a commercial roaster and then aim to approximate the color of that finished coffee from the roaster. It’s imprecise to be sure, but we need to start somewhere. Also, it’s worth pointing out here that what specialty coffee calls dark, non-specialty calls medium, so it’s best to calibrate with something more precise than descriptors like medium, medium-dark and so on.

Here are a couple of product recommendations to standardize the way that you calibrate your roast, and the way that you are able to discuss and compare your roasts with others. To use either of these, you need to grind a couple grams of coffee first, in order to get the average of the color obtained from the roast.

Roast Vision from Espresso Vision ($300) – this tool offers roast level analysis with accuracy on par with solutions costing two to five times as much. It also wastes far less ground coffee to obtain a reading. At $300, it is best suited to the most discriminating home roaster, or someone who has decided to give small batch, commercial roasting a try.
Roasted Coffee Color Card from Sweet Marias ($3.00) – these roast level color cards are best suited for the more casual home roaster, who wants to analyze roast level without breaking the bank.

With all of this in mind, remember that color is only one variable. Two different coffee roasts can be exactly the same color, while arriving at that color through very different roast profiles. Variances can be due to different types of roasters (fluid bed vs. drum roaster), batch size, preheat temperature, batch to batch protocol, and how you drive the roast with the heat and air. The more data points you have, the more easily you can determine similarities and differences between two seemingly identical roasts.

Home Coffee Roasting Recommendations

As you head out on your home coffee roasting journey, here are a few general / miscellaneous recommendations that we know will be helpful for you starting out.

Strive for Consistency in Your Home Coffee Roast

When you start achieving home coffee roasts that you are happy with an you want to replicate in the future, true consistency will involve replicating the external conditions each time, as well as the technical roast profile. If you are roasting coffee outside, different temperatures on different days or at different times will cause your roasts to progress differently each time. When roasting back-to-back batches, the subsequent roast will most likely be at a higher temperature than the first. Dedicating a space indoors with conditioned air and making sure that the roaster is starting the second batch at the same temperature as the first will go a long way into improving your averages.

Master the Basics of Home Coffee Roasting

As with any new endeavor, it is important to master the basics before you move into more advanced areas. For home coffee roasting, this means you should initially resist the urge to play with all the knobs and dials. Use the pre-set profiles if your roaster came with them. Aim for a medium roast level somewhere between end of first crack and before second. This will ensure good development, while still preserving most of the unique characteristics of the coffee you are roasting. Err on the side of more development, rather than less. This is a smart approach, because you can always suffer through an underwhelming roast, but a grassy and vegetal underdeveloped roast will be insufferable. Decaf, barrel-aged, and experimental process coffees are examples of coffees that may require a little more expertise in order to handle, and we wouldn’t recommend that you attempt to tackle them as a beginner.

Use Coffee Beans from Regions You Are Familiar With

Try to source coffees from countries/regions that you are already familiar with, and with a processing method that you are used to. This will help you as you evaluate your roast, to know if something is truly off, vs. the potential that you just don’t vibe with the particular coffee you are trying to roast, no matter how well you roast it.

Home Coffee Roasting for Blends

Remember that different coffees require different charge temperatures and roast profiles to get them to the same level of development. If you are attempting to roast two different coffees for an espresso blend, for example, it would be smart to roast them separately from each other and blend them together afterward. This will allow you to do what is best for each coffee in each roast, without having to compromise one for the other.

Cupping Your Home Roasted Coffee

In the first 24-48 hours after your roast, much of the volatile organic compounds responsible for aroma, and as much as 40% of the CO2 generated in the roast, have escaped the beans and diffused into the atmosphere. Don’t pass on the opportunity to gain a better understanding of what a particular coffee and a corresponding roast profile have to offer. Make sure to do a cupping shortly after the roast completes, and log your notes for future reference.

Rest Period for Your Home Roasted Coffee

While it is important to cup the coffee within the first 24 hours after your roast, you should rest your coffee a couple of days, or even a couple weeks before brewing. Extended rest time is more crucial if you are going to be brewing with the espresso method. The abundance of CO2 leaving the grounds gets in the way of the extraction. The high level of variability during the most active degassing of the coffee makes it very difficult to dial in on espresso. It is also believed that an abundance of CO2 can heighten the amount of perceived sourness, sharpness, and acidity in the coffee. The amount of time you should rest your coffee will also vary based on the roast level. Light roasted coffee will take longer than dark roasted coffee to de-gas, due to a tighter and less broken-down cell structure.

How to Store Your Home Roasted Coffee

When deciding on how to store coffee that you have roasted, a few key factors that you need to consider are oxygen, moisture, heat, and sunlight. You want to keep your coffee away from these elements as you store it, and below are a few recommendations for products that will help you do that.

Airscape Coffee Canister from Airscape ($30-40) – The Airscape uses lids with seals and one-way valves that you can push down as you draw down the coffee, eliminating head space.
Atmos Coffee Canister from Fellow Products ($30-40) – The Atmos has a vacuum mechanism to remove air from the container to slow down staling. The trade-off for a lower oxygen and moisture environment is that the negative pressure created by the vacuum effectively speeds up the aging process by accelerating the rate of degassing and diffusion of VOCs. For home roasters, it’s kind of good thing, because you’ll find you’re almost always running out of coffee and forgetting to roast until it’s too late. Since you don’t want to brew coffee that hasn’t properly rested, the Atmos might be just the ticket to keep you in the game of brewing when your roasting game is slacking.

Whatever you choose, aim to protect your coffee oxygen, heat, moisture, and sunlight by keeping it stored in a cool, dark and dry environment. It is also helpful to minimize the amount of headspace and prevent air exchange.

Happy Roasting and Brewing!

We hope this information was helpful for you as you start out on your home roasting journey! Good luck in your roasting endeavors, and happy brewing! Speaking of brewing, there’s no better way to extract your new roasted coffee than with a Flair Espresso Maker.

The post Roasting Coffee at Home: A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on Flair Espresso.

Espresso University – Demystifying Dark Roasts

Jeff Walcott — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 16:33:09 +0000

For this installment of Espresso University, Flair Espresso has teamed up with Raghunath from Ārāmse, an incredible coffee company from India, to take a trip “to the dark side” of coffee roasts. In this video and blog you’ll learn all about dark roasts, which still make up the majority of coffee that is consumed around the world. Watch below, or keep reading and as always, love what you brew.

Introduction to Dark Roasts
As Raghunath says, when it comes to specialty coffee, the emphasis always seems to be on medium and light roasts, with a focus on acidity and floral notes. But the truth is that those drinking light roasts globally are still a very small percentage of coffee drinkers. The majority still prefer medium-dark and dark roasts that are more chocolaty and bitter.

And, while everyone should pick the coffee that’s right for them, we at Flair would be remiss if we didn’t help educate on all roast levels, especially when it comes to our Flair products. The main takeaway here is to choose what’s best for you, and make sure that it’s sustainably sourced and freshly roasted.

So what exactly is a dark roast? Every roaster has a different scale for what they consider light, medium or dark, so it can be hard to understand. But, for the purposes of this educational video, when we say dark roast we’re referring to beans that have at least hit the second crack in the roasting process. A straightforward way to identify this visually is to look for oils on the surface of the beans, which make the beans look glossy, or shiny. The oilier the beans the darker the roast!

Dark roasts are more forgiving in many ways, especially in how easily they give up their soluble material and also how much better they are at maintaining puck integrity when pulling a shot. That being said, dark roasts still present some unique challenges that need to be managed in order to get the best out of them. It’s very easy to over extract a dark roast and get a really bitter and astringent brew, so a lot of what we’ll be discussing today is how to avoid this.

So let’s look at the key variables of espresso and how each should be approached when brewing dark roasts.

The Flair 58
Before we dive further into dark roasts, we should mention that today we’ll be brewing with a Flair 58. The Flair 58 is great for this type of educational activity, because it allows for full control over all the variables in the brewing process, including pressure, dose, ratio, time and temperature. The Flair 58’s industry standard 58mm portafilter accepts any basket size, so you can easily modify your dose and brew ratio accordingly. And, with the preheat control system of the Flair 58, you can easily preheat your brewing chamber for better thermal management during your extraction.

If you haven’t seen the Flair 58 yet, check it out below.

Flair 58 Manual Espresso Maker

The Flair 58 is our flagship in manual espresso brewing. Get café-quality espresso at home all while benefitting from the immediate feedback and control of a manual system, which is enhanced with an industry standard 58mm basket and preheat control system.

Add a Flair 58 to Your Cart

Dose for Dark Roasts
The first variable Raghunath describes is dose. As with any coffee, start with deciding on your dose based on the size of the drink you want. Also ensure that you’re using an appropriate sized basket for the dose that you’re working with. The Flair 58’s industry standard portafilter allows you to switch out your stock basket for third party baskets of various sizes. For the sake of simplicity in this lesson, Raghunath uses a standard dose of 18g. One other thing to note, is that dose is something that we like to keep fixed and only tweak very slightly on occasions. With dose it’s best to pick and lock it in.

And here’s a fun fact. The darker the roast the more porous and less dense your ground coffee will be. This means that a darker roasted coffee, once ground, will take up quite a bit more volume than the same dose of a lighter roast.

Temperature for Dark Roasts
If you watch Ārāmse’s in-depth review of the Flair 58 you’ll see they talk about how the combination of brew head temperature and water temperature combines to give the brewing temperature. Dark roasts are a lot more soluble and therefore require lower temperatures to avoid over extraction. So, on the Flair 58 Raghunath recommends sticking to the low preheat control setting and experimenting with your kettle temperature starting as low as 85 degrees C for very dark roasts. If this doesn’t hit the mark for your palate you can increase by 2 degrees C at a time to dial-in.

Grind Size for Dark Roasts
Dark roasts give up their soluble material a lot more easily than light roasts, so Raghunath recommends grinding a little coarser than you do for lighter roasts to both reduce surface area and contact time with water, which will reduce your chances of over extraction.

Brewing Ratios
Now, your brew ratio is basically the ratio of the weight of dry coffee you dose into the basket to the weight of brewed espresso extracted in your cup. Dark roasts allow for much shorter ratios, giving the brewer a textural experience that you just can’t enjoy with lighter roasts.

This is because, during the extraction process acids are extracted first, followed by sugars and then oils and bitter solids. The longer you roast coffee the more the acids break down, which is why dark roasts have significantly less acidity than light roasts. This is why you’ll be able to pull ratios like 1:1 with dark roasts without it tasting like battery acid. Instead, you get a thick, gooey, intense but balanced brew that doesn’t have harsh bitterness and astringency. So we suggest starting at around 1:1.75 and working your way down to 1:1 to find your sweet spot.

Pressure & Flow
Having full control over pressure & flow means that you can play around to quite literally “squeeze” the best out of your coffee. Raghunath recommends trying this side by side comparison, in three parts.

Start with the classic Italian 9 BAR profile where you quickly ramp up to 9bar and keep it there for the duration of the shot.
Then pull a second flat profile but keep the pressure lower at like 6 BAR and see how that affects the taste and texture. You’ll notice that the bitterness is a bit more subdued at lower pressures.
Finally, try a declining profile when you start at 9b and ramp down slowly to 6b as the puck loses integrity. Let you palate decided what you enjoy.

Dark Roast Freshness and Rest Periods
How long past the roast date do you wait before brewing your dark roasted coffee? Dark roasts are more porous and therefore degas quicker and subsequently stale faster than medium and light roasts. The window between roasting and brewing is called resting and Raghunath recommends 3 – 7 days for dark roasts while lighter ones can be up to 3 – 4 weeks. Brew too soon and you’ll have spluttering, choking and uneven extractions. Wait too long and you’ll have gushing extractions with barely any crema and you’ll find yourself having to grind much finer to be able to build any pressure. In both cases you’re not going to be experiencing the coffee at its peak.

Brew at the right time and dark roast pulls look stunning. The fact that they have more built up CO2, when compared to light roasts, means you’ll get a much more generous layer of crema.

Brewing Time with Dark Roasts
Time isn’t a variable we have direct control over but rather it’s a variable that’s affected by tweaking one or more of the other variables like dose or grind size. A finer grind will increase brew time whereas a coarser grind that allows for higher flow will decrease it. It’s also a useful marker to use while troubleshooting.

If you pull two shots back to back, with identical parameters and the second shot takes 5 – 8 secs longer than you know that you’ve either not recreated the pressure curve accurately or your puck prep was different. This isn’t dark roast specific, but is a useful metric to track changes made to the other variables.

Well that’s it for this last Espresso University tutorial on dark roasted coffee. We hope this will help all you dark roast junkies get the most out of your Flair 58 or any of Flair’s other brewers for that matter.

The post Espresso University – Demystifying Dark Roasts appeared first on Flair Espresso.

Espresso University – The Basics of Espresso

Jeff Walcott — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 18:28:38 +0000

This installment of Espresso University features Martina Vigo, barista and co-founder of Flat & White coffee in Argentina, who has stopped by to drop some knowledge on the basics of espresso. And, as you all will come to see, there’s no better tool to learn espresso brewing than a Flair Espresso Maker. The Flair is perfect for those just getting started because the manual lever system allows users to truly understand the process, from bean to cup. But, before we get too deep, let’s start with the basics as Martina explains them and embark on a trip to “espresso land.”

What is Espresso
So, what is espresso? As Martina explains it, espresso is both a drink and a brewing method. Those big machines you see at coffee shops and cafes all around the world specialize in this brewing method, which is characterized by forcing heated water at high pressures, through a bed of finely ground coffee in a short period of time. This process creates a coffee drink known as espresso, which is small in volume and highly concentrated.

The espresso brewing method is completely different from other coffee brewing methods, like pour over or drip coffee for example, and the texture and mouthfeel of the espresso drink that comes from it will be completely different.

But, it’s important to note that regardless of the brewing method, any coffee beans can be used! There are no beans that are specific only to espresso. Any coffee bean, from light to dark roast, can be used in espresso, and bags of coffee that say they are an “espresso blend” simply mean that the roaster recommends these beans for the espresso brewing method!

This should open up a world of coffee to everyone, and Martina recommends that new home brewers try out different coffees and pick the ones they like best.

Grinding for Espresso
So, now that we’ve chosen our coffee, we need to grind it for espresso. Martina says that grind quality and consistency is the number one priority in brewing delicious espresso. But that it’s also the most easily overlooked topic by beginning espresso brewers. Everyone wants a nice espresso machine and tends to put the grinder lower down on the priority list. But this shouldn’t be the case!

Now, grinding for espresso means that the grounds will be very fine, and that a small fluctuation or change in the grind size or consistency will have a significant impact on the taste of your espresso. This is why Martina recommends getting a grinder with micro-adjustments, or one that is stepless, so that it’s easy for the home brewer to dial-in their grind just as they like it.

Why the Flair is Great for Espresso at Home?
As Martina says, the Flair is a manual machine, and home brewers have access to all the variables of the extraction, which allows them to create an amazing espresso just the way they like it. In addition to this, the Flair is a great learning tool. Changing one variable at a time like tamping, brew pressure, grind size or water temperature, can allow the brewer to understand how that change impacts the taste of the espresso in their cup. This type of control is difficult to find in an electric espresso machine, unless you can spend in the thousands of dollars.

Finally, the Flair is totally portable, and doesn’t require electricity, so you can handcraft espresso anywhere you are and take your coffee with you.

Flair PRO 2 Manual Espresso Maker

The Flair PRO 2 is the best in manual espresso that still comes in a portable package. Brew anywhere and get café-quality espresso all while benefitting from the immediate feedback and control of a manual system.

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Using a Flair Espresso Maker

So, now that we understand what espresso is, let’s assemble the Flair and go through its parts to get a better understanding of how it works. In the video, Martina is using a Flair PRO 2, which home brewers can pick in one of three colors: black, chrome or white.The first step is to assemble the Flair’s two major components, the base and the lever, which features the portafilter base. These two items can be affixed with a screw if you’re not traveling for a while and want a little more stability. But every Flair works perfectly without this screw.

Then, Martina introduces us all to the Brew Head, which as she says, “Is where the magic happens.”

The PRO 2 brew head comes with a few different parts: like the bottomless portafilter where we put our coffee, the dispersion screen that goes on top of it, and the brewing cylinder which holds the brew water. Inside the brew cylinder is the stainless steel plunger. The stem and Flair’s custom pressure gauge connect to this plunger to lower it during extractions and create the pressure needed for espresso.

All in all, it’s a pretty simple machine, being just a lever! But Flair didn’t stop there, and has provided a range of accessories, which are also beautiful, to make brewing easier! A branded stainless steel drip tray shines in the light while keeping your counter clean, and a stainless steel tamper, dosing cup, funnel, preheat cap and a removable spout are all featured to ensure you get the best brewing experience.

How to Make Espresso at Home

As with every manual espresso machine, the first step is to preheat the parts to ensure the temperature of the water stays high enough for the brew. Martina says you can do this by using the included preheat cap for the cylinder, or the home brewer can use any type of funnel to position the cylinder and portafilter on top of the kettle they’re using to heat the water. This option is faster and more efficient.

While the brew cylinder is preheating the coffee beans can be prepared, making sure that we grind for espresso as discussed previously! And Martina cannot emphasize how important getting a set of brewing scales is, as it will make measuring much easier and more precise. As Martina has mentioned, every small change in espresso variables will change the taste of the espresso in your cup, so a scale will aid in managing these variables like extraction time and output!

In the video, Martina has found that for this coffee 17 grams is a great dose size, so that’s what she decides to grind. The grind setting you’ll need will be different for each coffee, and you’ll have to tweek it daily for the same coffee. You can’t just dial in once and “set it and forget it!”

Once the portafilter is nice and warm, Martina adds the grounds to the portafilter using the dosing funnel. She then uses what’s called a WDT or a Weiss Distribution Technique tool that makes sure the grounds are uniform throughout the basket, with no air bubbles or areas where the coffee can get more or less compacted. This ensures an even extraction.

Then Martina brings in the handy stainless steel tamper, made specifically for the Flair PRO 2. She tamps those fluffy grounds into a beautiful cake, making sure to tamp as level as possible. She then puts the dispersion screen on top, and sets the portafilter into the base.

Once the water is ready and the cylinder is hot to the touch, Martina places it on top of the portafilter and fills it up with the water, just above the plunger so there’s no air gap inside. She then places the scale and an espresso cup below the portafilter, sets the scale to zero and begins to lower the lever!

As Martina mentions in the video, here is where you can get creative. As you pull down the lever, as long as you have your grind dialed in, you’ll start to see the gauge register some pressure. You can play around with this variable, performing pre infusions, ramps, and tapers. This is the part of espresso brewing that’s called flow control, and is a feature usually only found in machines priced at least 10 times more than the Flair!

Martina begins slowly pulling down until she sees the pressure gauge going to 2 or 3 BAR of pressure, then she maintains this position until a few drops start coming out of the portafilter. Then she slowly and steadily increases the force on the lever until the gauge reaches the espresso range! Here Martina stays, until she reaches her desired output measured by her scale. Doing this, the extraction should take about 40 to 50 seconds, which is a little bit longer than regular electric espresso machines.

For this particular coffee and the 17 grams used Martina says she likes to extract 40 grams of espresso yield. This is a ratio of 1:2.3, which is measured by comparing input weight to output weight. Home brewers should change this ratio based on the coffee and roast type they’re using. But, for a medium roast, this is a good starting point for novice brewers.

What is Crema?
And now that the shot has been pulled, we can see on top of the espresso this golden brown foam named crema. Baristas and home brewers can get very fixated on crema because it looks beautiful and is very appetizing to the eye (and the mouth). But what exactly is this crema?

Martina explains that the process of roasting coffee creates CO2 that is trapped in the coffee beans. When the coffee is freshly roasted it has lots of CO2 inside. During brewing, the highly pressurised water becomes supersaturated with the CO2 – as it extracts – and then will begin to release it. These tiny bubbles make a smooth foam that we call crema. The pressure is the key here, this is why we don’t get crema in other brewing methods like pour overs.

Now, fresher beans and a higher roast level will yield more crema. And a darker roast will usually result in darker crema. At the correct pressure for espresso, and with fresh enough beans, crema will be present. But we don’t have to take the amount or the colour of the crema as an indicator of the quality of the shot.

For example a light roast will be more pale in color and have less crema. But if dialed in right, this light roast will still be amazing in taste!

And that’s it! A basic introduction to espresso by Martina Vigo of Flat & White.

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