Day 208: Today's Pick — The Chemex Coffee Maker

The Chemex is a piece of Pyrex glassware that has been on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art since 1944. This is the most useful single fact you can know about it.

The Chemex was designed in 1941 by Peter Schlumbohm, a German-born chemist who had emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s and was, at the time of designing the carafe, an itinerant inventor with a small basement laboratory and a string of strange patents (an erotic-novelty cocktail shaker, a "ventilator without electricity," a few medical devices that did not catch on). He looked at the standard chemistry-lab Erlenmeyer flask, which has a cone-shaped opening flaring out from a flat base, attached the cone to a second cone in inverted form, wrapped the resulting hourglass-shaped vessel in a leather collar with a wooden tie at the waist, and patented the result as a "coffee maker."

The patent is dated August 17, 1941. The first Chemexes shipped out of a small factory in Massachusetts later that year. The design has not changed.

I want to make the case for buying one in 2026, alongside (or instead of) the V60 (which I reviewed back on Day 76), because the Chemex makes a different kind of cup of coffee — and there is a place at the table for it.

What is a Chemex? Mechanically, it is the simplest coffee tool I will ever describe to you. It is a piece of glassware shaped like an hourglass, with a built-in spout (the "molded air channel," in Schlumbohm's patent), and you brew coffee in it by placing a special, very thick, square-bottomed paper filter inside the upper cone, adding ground coffee, pouring hot water, and waiting.

What's special is the paper filter. Chemex filters are 20–30% thicker than typical pour-over filters, and they are folded into a square-bottomed cone that fits the geometry of the upper cone exactly. The thicker paper does two things. First, it strips out the small "fines" — the very small particles of ground coffee — that produce body in a French press but also produce a slight cloudiness and a faint coffee-sediment finish in your cup. The Chemex cup is the cleanest cup of coffee you can produce at home. Second, the thicker paper slows the flow rate, which means a Chemex brew takes longer than a V60 — typically five to seven minutes per pot — and produces a slightly more developed extraction.

The result is a coffee that is bright, clean, almost wine-like in clarity, and slightly less heavy in body than a V60 or a French press. If you like the texture of a high-end pour-over from a third-wave coffee shop, the Chemex is the closest you can get at home.

A small recipe to start with: 36 grams medium-coarse ground coffee, 600 grams water at 200°F, brewed across about six minutes. Bloom 45 seconds with 100g water; pour the rest in three slow circular pours. Adjust to taste. Single-origin Ethiopians and Kenyans shine in a Chemex; the clarity reveals their fruit notes in a way no French press can manage.

Practical buying notes. The 6-cup classic Chemex (with the wooden collar and leather tie) is the right size for most home setups; 8-cup is generous, 3-cup is single-batch only. Pricing is around $50 for the 6-cup. The filters are proprietary — square-bottomed, thick, folded — and you have to buy them from Chemex; a 100-pack runs $13. Generic filters do not work; they collapse, channel, and produce a much weaker brew.

A care note. The wooden collar comes off (loosen the leather tie) for cleaning. Hand-wash the glass with hot water and no detergent; coffee oils can be polished off with a small amount of baking soda paste once a month. The carafe is dishwasher-safe (top rack), but I would not put the wooden collar in the dishwasher.

A small philosophical note. The Chemex is a beautiful object first and a coffee maker second, and that is, oddly, the source of its quiet appeal. It sits on the counter like a small piece of postwar industrial design — because it is one. It looks the same as the Chemex Schlumbohm produced for the MoMA show in 1944. It looks the same as the one your grandmother might have owned in 1957. It looks the same as the one a Brooklyn third-wave café will be using in 2046. There is a small joy to owning an object that has been continuously made, unchanged, for 85 years.

This is Day 208. The pick is glass.