Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had been using the brown unbleached paper filters, i liked the clean strong coffee i could get with the filters, but i wanted to make the move from non reusable paper coffee filters to something less wasteful. This seemed like the best option based on great the reviews. Here is why it is not comparable and not a good substitute: The mesh is not fine enough. Water goes through twice or three times faster than through a paper coffee filter, so the coffee has lees time to infuse into the water. The coffee you get with this filter is not "clean" as it is when using a paper filter but murky like with a french press, except not as rich as with a french press. There is a lot more plastic on this than you can see in the image. The base of the filter is almost completely made of plastic. I do not like hot liquids to come in contact with plastic, many studies have shown that plastics produce unhealthy chemicals especially when exposed to heat. Because this is made of a combination of metal mesh and plastic on the bottom more water flows over the grounds and out the sides of the mesh when it is more full, once it gets closer to the plastic there is less mesh so the water flow is obstructed. In a paper filter water travels down, but because of the design of this, water travels out to the sides, which means the water is flowing over a lot of the grounds rather than through them so the finer coffee grounds that release more flavor are less exposed to the water than the rougher grounds on top. All of this adds up to less flavor extracted from the coffee and a more one dimensional watery kind of coffee. A better design would have been to have a mesh screen at the bottom as well. Overall, this is a bad replacement for paper filters. The design is lacking and the resulting coffee is both significantly different than paper filters but also less flavorful, with the added bonus of sludge at the bottom of your cup.