Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I really wanted to like this device. It received good reviews from some respectable coffee "experts" and it seemed to be a nearly ideal setup for making consistently great coffee and it seemed easy to keep clean. Our drip coffee maker broke and I was looking for an alternative that was easier to keep clean and more landfill friendly. However, this pot just requires too much effort to get good tasting coffee from it. I came to the conclusion that method is flawed and I ultimately returned it. The reason this CAN achieve so little sediment is that after 4 minutes, much of the sediment has settled to the bottom and the way this thing pours, the sediment slides into a pocket towards the front and does not easily pour out of the pitcher (cool design this part). If you follow the instructions, you will get great tasting coffee with some particulate matter, but not too much. It will be weak and your 2nd cup will be room temperature, but good tasting. If you preheat this pot, I found that the sediment increased dramatically, even at the coursest setting on my Breville BCG800XL Smart Grinder. We did not like it. Getting all the coffee grounds out of a cylindrical filter this large is a pain to do each and every day and if I had to live with water restrictions, this would not be the way to go. Perhaps if it were rectangular to allow the water to flow thru from the outside or if the holes were smaller? As it is, 80% the water just flows around the filter if you rinse from the outside and if you rinse from the inside, not enough water stays in the pot to wash away the grinds. Since I returned it (about 7 months ago), I have been achieving the same effect every morning by simply putting the coffee grinds into an empty preheated $2 porcelain pot and pouring 200 degree water over the grounds, whisking it up a bit, let it steep for 30 to 300 seconds, then pour this cowboy style coffee thru a metal filter Fresco Cone Shaped Coffee Filter inside a silicon Java Drip Coffee Maker into a pre-heated thermos. A #4 metal filter is MUCH easier to clean and the entire setup costs 1/3rd the price. <Update, I have since switched to Melitta brown paper filters as it seems that no one I know likes any sediment at all in their coffee> One advantage to this method is that it is easy to brew 12oz or less with no negative effect on taste. On the Sowden, the filter does not reach the bottom, so you still have a minimum amount of coffee that needs to be made. Another advantage to using a $2 pot: it allows me to use a paper filter when I want to get ALL the particulate matter. Although this stops the oils from getting thru, most guests just do not want any grounds whatsoever in their coffee. In short, the Sowden is overly expensive, difficult to clean, has no allowance for paper filters, and the coffee quickly gets ice cold. If they change the design to be a square filter to make it easier to clean and make the holes about 1/2 as large as they are now and had the user pre-heat the pot, then I would likely give it 5 stars.