You can get very good coffee out of this that is very forgiving to grind size and puck prep which is one of the reasons I bought this. However, there are some very frustrating quirks.
1. Heat retention is poor and i find I need to purge at least twice with boiling water before I can pull a shot to my liking. Even then, the coffee often comes out lukewarm if I don’t load the portafilter fast enough.
2. You can’t preheat unless the portafilter is installed without making a total mess. Hence you have to load the portafilter as fast as possible after you preheat the system and now your portafilter is hot to handle.
3. The fill tube is very sensitive with how high you fill it. If you go too high, it leaks everywhere when you go to press the coffee.
4. I’ve found due to the low heat retention, that putting a second half batch of boiling water through the grounds quickly can help extract a little more evenly. If the last pour of water hasn’t completely depressurized before doing this, the spring system can rebound and send boiling water shooting out of the top like it’s old faithful.
Overall I do like the taste of the coffee and it works great for iced coffee especially since the beverage doesn’t come out super hot. The problem is that I bought this for convenience as it was marketed as a “nespresso killer”. I wanted to have this be a quick way to make coffee in between meetings when I didn’t have the full time to mess with pulling a shot on my flair 58. Unfortunately, with the need to preheat, this takes almost as long as pulling a proper shot on the flair. Hopefully they find some solutions to these issues. I realize a built in heater would drastically increase the cost, but there’s other things that could probably improve thermal efficiency outside that.
