Well designed and well built, but it doesn't make good coffee due to underheating of the water.
Positive Product Points
-Gold filter -Isulated pot -No heating pad -~4 minute extraction time -Nice styling
Negative Product Points
-Hard to clean -Low filter capacity -Hard to pour from the pot -LOW EXTRACTION TEMP -MAKES BAD TO OK COFFEE
Detailed Commentary
Well designed and well built, but it doesn't make good coffee due to underheating of the water.I recently inherited this machine when my father started using one of the pod based coffee makers. I was happy to get it since it has many of the features that lend themselves to brewing a decent pot of coffee. The unheated base and insulated pot keep the coffee hot for quite a while without a warmer plate which can burn the coffee. The gold filter is nice and the sealed pot is an inovative way to reduce the loss of volitile compound in the coffee. The complexity of the machine make cleaning it well dificult. I tried cleaning it with water at normal pressures and found quickly that all the little spaces in this machines mechanisms were impossible to get to without either a toothbrush or higher pressure water streams. As I'm in a lab setting I used DI water from a narrow plastic tube which gave me a single beam of water that could easily blast away even caked on residues. Easy for me, but leaves the average user SOL. Ultimately I barely care about easy of cleaning as long as the coffee produced is good, which it isn't. It toke me a bit of time to figure out what the problem was since it was the first time I'd used a gold filter, ultimately it turned out to be low extraction temperature. While the machine heated either hot or cold water to nearly the same temperature, it heated it to about 84C which is about 10C too cold for optimal extraction. Lastly, whatever unit of measure the water indicator is in, it sure isn't cups.
Buying Experience
Was great, just picked it up off my father's counter :)
