• 2 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I love my Flair because each pull is unique and when the pull is great it’s some of the best ever. If you prefer consistency, may not be for you.

    My personality gives me a lot of pleasure in tinkering and control so I love being completely hands on with the Flair. You will pull some of the best shots you’ve ever had when you get it dialed in. You will also have many fails. Although once you get the basic techniques down the fails are not undrinkable.

    But because I enjoy this totally hand-crafted approach I even enjoy my fails. It’s like jazz improvisation.



  • Excellent! I found that This Naked Mind really help me uncover all the lies that our culture tells about alcohol and not feel as tempted by the “fun” things or FOMO.

    I mean, I wouldn’t take part in some “heroin tasting,” either and would be quite convinced I wouldn’t be missing out.

    (I’m not connected to Annie Grace in any way, just felt like that book helped a lot).












  • It’s really just more my own person way of thinking about it after watching Hoffmanns’s method. It certainly is drip. But Hoffmann swirls the grounds so that you get a kind of best of both worlds of drip and immersion. I prefer to think of it as immersion when I’m trying to dial in the extraction because using Hoffmann’s method the grounds float around in the cone.

    Edit to add another thought I had: I think Hoffmann has a video where he shows his swirling technique. The idea is that suspending the grains exposes them more equally to the water for a more balanced extraction. That said, many people do not do this with their pour over so it would have some other similarity to drip and percolator methods. If memory serves, Hoffmann also has a percolation vs immersion video that is worth watching.



  • Really interesting thanks. I’ve come to think of pressure on my Flair as not super important just for pressure’s sake. As long as you can hit at least 5-6 bars you’ll get espresso. I concentrate more on pressure as flow rate. Do I want to speed up certain parts of the extraction? Then up the pressure. So for example, the first seconds of an espresso pull might be fruity and more acidic, then gets sweeter and the final phase more bitter. A lot of factors influence this more than just time and every bean is different. But with the Flair, you could go slower (lower pressure) through the first phase and faster through the end if you like that profile.


  • I use pour over when I want a clean, paper-filtered cup of coffee that is richer than your typical drip brew. All of the other methods I prefer to use — mostly Flair espresso and moka pot, but occasionally cafetière—are unfiltered. That leaves more body (oils and solubles) which I prefer. But sometimes you want that clean brew from the paper filter.

    I think of a pour over as an immersion style of brewing. So in some ways it is similar to the cafetière. But because of the filter method, a French press is going to require larger grind size which results in a slightly different (in your case “woody”) extraction.

    I also like that the pour over gives me more room to experiment with grind size and volumes. This is oversimplified but extraction comes down to basically three things: grind size, water volume/contact time, and temperature. The grind size on a cafetière can result in a hollow extraction sometimes where you’re not getting the full range of what the bean has to offer.

    Of course, the main downside to a paper filter is the removal of oils, which also affects the flavor. Especially if you prefer an oily style in which the cafetière, espresso and moka excel.