Coffee is the original biohack and the nation’s most popular productivity tool. As we’ve battled the changeover to daylight saving time, the caffeine-addicted WIRED Reviews team has spent the past week writing about our favorite coffee brewing routines and devices that’ll keep us alert and maybe even happy in the morning. Today, we finally write about the mighty Chemex. You can also check out other Java.Base stories where WIRED writers sharing their favorite brewing methods.
It is a profound disappointment to me that, despite reviewing consumer goods while working for the world’s finest publisher of periodicals, I spend very little of my time interacting with objects that would be at home in the lives of Don Draper or James Bond. Writing and editing for WIRED means testing some very nice things, but so few of those things are truly elegant, let alone arguably perfect.
The exception is any morning that I make my coffee with a Chemex. The hourglass-shaped Chemex coffee maker is perhaps the most beautiful everyday object I regularly lay my hands on, and quite possibly the best designed. The sturdy and shock-proof borosilicate glass holds a thick, bonded paper filter at the perfect 60-degree angle to keep your water exposed to the ground beans before gravity fills the pot below. No mechanical parts or plastic leaves nothing to go wrong. My mornings begin with beauty and consistency.
Though it’s typically seen as an icon of midcentury modern design, the Chemex is actually a little older. The device was invented by a German chemist in 1941 and was already vintage by the early 1960s when Mad Men is set. When the Chemex appeared in From Russia With Love, it was already older than the Blu-Ray disc is to us now. When it appeared on Friends in 1994, it was a technology as old as the Betamax is today.
It’s stayed around that long because there’s really never been anything that does what it does as well, let alone while looking as good as it does while doing it.
It’s common to discuss the learning curve in mastering the Chemex, even compared to other pour-over methods. I think that’s overstated and a little unfair to the device. I suppose the Chemex is more difficult than scooping preground Folgers into a Mr. Coffee or punching a K-Cup into the office machine. But that’s not really a fair comparison—the Chemex is for people who care enough about their coffee to make manual espresso or use an Aeropress. And compared to those methods, it’s dead simple to use and extremely forgiving.
Yes, you can be extraordinarily fussy about your morning cup of Chemex, and if you’re militant about the methods, it is capable of making a peerless cup of drip coffee. Go to Stumptown Coffee or Onyx Coffee Labs or Milstead and Co. or any of the other high temples of coffee snobbery and order a pour-over of the Peru Timbuyacu Maragogype from a 50-acre low-yield farm in northern Peru, and there’s a very good chance they’ll make it with a Chemex. At Onyx, they might carefully pour 900 grams of water in 200-gram increments with 90-second breaks between each, and carefully pour the water from a gooseneck kettle into the center of the cone until the final wash. The process will take six or seven minutes, and if you do it at home, it will not only show respect for Panama Esmeralda Special Geisha beans that cost $85 per pound, but also give you a result that is extraordinarily clean and flavorful.
I do this little ritual at most once or twice a year when I have a special bag of beans. On those occasions, I will measure my coffee beans and set the water kettle to 195 degrees instead of the default 212. But my normal mornings are busy, and I’m typically pushing the button on the Baratza Virtuoso (that I load up once a week instead of storing the beans in an airtight container), eyeballing the amount of grounds (instead of using a scooper, let alone a scale), and boiling water (instead of setting it between 195 and 205 with lighter roasts getting lower tempartures) while packing my daughter’s lunch. On most mornings, I do a quick pour to bloom the grinds, and then dump the rest of the water in at once while I read my emails and try not to burn the toast.
And you know what? That coffee usually tastes very good. The Chemex is, in fact, quite merciful. The Aeropress is also a great and unique design, but it’s much, much more difficult to master. I read with great interest my colleague Michael Calore’s praise for the Kalita Wave, which I have never used. It does sound impressive, though it somehow reminds me of Bender from Futurama, and as with the Hario V60 I occasionally employ, I don’t love that the Wave doesn’t have an integrated pot. Coffee from the Chemex is a little cleaner, a little crisper, and has a pleasant roundness compared to what I get from other pour-overs.
The Chemex secret we don’t talk enough about is the brand’s unique filters. The inventor was a chemist, and the bonded filters are modeled on laboratory paper. Chemex filters are thick and heavy and designed to strip away oils, acidity, and sediment. I buy the pre-folded ones a few hundred at a time. During the pandemic, when they were briefly unavailable, I vowed never to let my stock get too low. So now I hoard them. Because while I don’t always use the Chemex, I always want to have it sitting there available, just as it has been for lovers of coffee and design for the better part of a century.
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