Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We ordered a refurbished KitchenAid KCM4212SX for substantially less money and it recently arrived in perfect condition as far as I could tell. A rep from Amazon told some years ago that refurbished were still warranted by Amazon and often just the packaging was damaged. In this case, it was factory refurbished and was in excellent condition. As a retired mechanical engineer, I can truly appreciate the ergonomics that went into the design. It’s a tremendous design and simple to use. I will be making cold brew tea more often than not while my wife will undoubtably be making cold brew coffee. The concentrate ratio for tea leaves is substantially greater than the coffee ratio but both are significant. I completely took the unit apart today to clean it and get a better understanding of how the unit works. It shines with quality and weight and is easy to operate. Some thinking definitely went into its design. The plastic wrench doubles as a plastic nut to hold the drain and after that is removed along with the hose it has another wrench at its end to fit the plastic nut that holds the valve. The valve is sturdy and is also of high quality in my opinion. I’ve looked up the chemistry behind cold brewing and I do recommend that you do the same. The taste of cold brew is amazing if you have never had it before. I recommend that you use filtered water and heat the water enough to dissolve your sugar ahead of time so as to get it into solution. You can then throw in some ice that was made with the filtered water to cool it down. You would only do this if you knew exactly how your going to like it based on the ratios. As I recall, the concentrate coffee ratio is 3 to 1 and the tea leaves is 7 to 1. Once you get comfortable using the device, I think you will be keeping your concentrate readily available. The amounts are given by weight which can be estimated with the lines on the unit. We are fortunate to have a very nice high end scale. More and more I seem to be finding recipes that specify amounts by weight in grams. Again, once you have made a batch of one or the other, I think the lines will suffice.