Chemex is one of the most popular pour-over options for coffee fans. Its iconic hourglass design extracts the best flavors and aromas from the beans used with it.
But what is the best coffee for Chemex brews? We’ll take you through some top options as well as how to perfect and dial in your pour-over technique.
The Top 3 Best Coffees For Your Chemex
These three choices from Cafely are beautifully aromatic with a rich and balanced flavor, making each a fantastic pairing with your Chemex to discover the vibrant world of Vietnamese coffee.
1. DaNang Coffee (Arabica x Robusta)
DaNang is a medium-dark roast blend with notes of hazelnut, maple syrup, and citrus. The combination of robusta and arabica beans creates a balanced blend. The earthy, bitter, bold robusta beans blend well with the nutty, citrusy flavors of arabica coffee beans.
2. SaiGon OG (Robusta x Arabica x Peaberry)
This flagship coffee is a mixture of three different beans (robusta, arabica, and peaberry). These beans all have slightly different flavors, from the earthy robusta to the intense peaberry, and they’ve been delicately balanced to create a breathtaking combination. The roasters aimed to create something that reminded them of the city of Saigon through a sophisticated traditional butter roast with a rich and velvety flavor.
3. DaLat Coffee (100% Arabica)
DaLat showcases the very best Vietnamese arabica beans, bursting with complex flavors that bring so much delicacy to the fore. Combined with a skillful dark roast, their natural sugars have been drawn out and caramelized to make a decadent and indulgent brew. The tasting notes for your final cup include caramel, blackberry, and stone fruit.
What Is a Chemex Coffee Brewer?
If you’re not quite sure what a Chemex brewer is from the name, we’re certain you’d know it from the look. It resembles a large glass hourglass, typically with a wooden or bamboo collar around the center.
The Chemex is a pour-over brewer. It works by pouring hot water over coffee grounds in a paper cone filter. As the water passes through the grounds, a perfectly extracted brew drips into the collection chamber below.
How to Brew Coffee With a Chemex
The top of the Chemex hourglass holds a filter and ground coffee. As hot water is poured over the grounds, the bottom fills with freshly brewed coffee. It’s relatively easy to make great-tasting coffee with a Chemex…
Here’s a brief guide to brewing in a Chemex:
- Set up your brewer — Make sure your Chemex is clean and ready to use.
- Place your filter — Rinse your filter with a small amount of hot water and put it in the top of the Chemex, making sure it fits well and that the tip points evenly toward the bottom.
- Grind your coffee — A coarse grind is best at a ratio of 1:15 coffee-to-water.
- Add the coffee grounds — Create an even layer of grounds at the bottom of the filter.
- Bloom the coffee — Start with a small amount of hot water poured over the grounds to help them release their flavor. You can give them a little stir with a chopstick or a small spoon to allow them to disperse.
- Pour the rest of the water — Slowly add the rest, using a small, circular motion to direct the flow to swirl around the center of the filter.
- Wait — Allow the water to do its thing, extracting the brewed coffee down into the bottom of the vessel until it reaches a very slow drip.
- Remove the filter — Take out the filter from the top and dispose of it appropriately.
- Serve and enjoy — Pour the freshly brewed coffee into your favorite mug and enjoy.
Want a more in-depth guide on brewing with a Chemex? Check out this Brew Guide.
Troubleshooting & Issues to Look Out for
Now that we understand the physics of brewing with a Chemex, here are some tips to make it easier to brew great coffee.
1. Bubbling in Larger Brewers
In larger Chemex brewers, there’s a greater distance between the base of the filter and the surface of the brewed coffee. Here, the drips can get to a higher speed, creating annoying bubbles at the top of the filter.
The flavor and aroma compounds within coffee are volatile, meaning they can and will evaporate over time. Bubbles created in a larger brewer expose more of the coffee to oxygen, potentially creating less intense flavors.
While there isn’t a surefire way to prevent this, pouring slowly and evenly will minimize the chance of this occurring.
2. Scorching Your Coffee
Chemex brewers are traditionally made from stovetop-safe glass — most commonly borosilicate. This is largely done so that you can leave a little coffee in the brewer to reheat or keep warm for a second cup.
While this helps you avoid wasting your second cup of coffee, heat speeds up the oxidation process. Allowing your coffee to sit on low heat will keep it drinkable for a longer time, but it will also lead to more flavor degrading.
It is also important to get the temperature level right upon reheating. If you heat the leftover coffee too much, more flavor and aroma chemicals will be extracted from particulates that get through the filter, leading to an over-extracted flavor.
3. A Potential Vacuum Nightmare
The internal glass on the filter section of a Chemex is super smooth. Because of this, a paper filter that has been saturated with water and coffee can cling to the glass and form an airtight seal. This seal can prevent the water from dripping through the coffee at the correct pace, leading to an over-extracted brew.
To avoid this, people often place a chopstick or something similar in the pouring spout of the Chemex. This supports some of the weight of the wet filter, preventing it from forming a seal with the glass.
Selecting the Best Roast for Your Chemex
Selecting the best roast for your Chemex might sound like a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s best to opt for a light to medium roast for making coffee in a Chemex.
The long brew time can dissolve tasty flavors in a lighter roast that other brewing methods would miss.
To understand why this is, let’s quickly go through how coffee changes during the roasting process:
- Green coffee — All coffee beans start as green coffee beans, which have been hulled and dried but are otherwise unchanged from the plant.
- The Maillard Reaction — During roasting, sugars from within the bean caramelize slowly, which takes the bean from the green color it naturally is through several gradations of darkness. The Maillard reaction is the most important caramelization stage, which brings out savory, chocolatey, and earthy notes in the beans.
- Evaporation and Cracking — As the beans heat, the water inside turns to steam, which bursts out, leading to a “crack” noise during roasting. This is what the first and second crack stages are. The longer the bean roasts, the more water evaporates, cooking out the aromatic and citrus flavors and turning them into sugary, chocolatey, darker flavors.
So, two processes are happening simultaneously: one by which the coffee is losing flavor, and one by which the coffee is gaining flavor. Generally, roasting coffee is about finding a balance between these two stages.
When you’re brewing with an immersion method like Chemex, where the coffee will typically sit in the water for several minutes, you can opt for a lighter roast. The added time will dissolve those plant flavor chemicals that have been preserved.
The Best Filters for a Chemex Brewer
There are three main filter choices for your Chemex.
Here are the three options on the market and their pros and cons:
1. Paper Filter
Paper filters are the most common choice for Chemex and almost every pour-over brewer. They're exceptionally fine and prevent even the tiniest granules of coffee from getting through. On top of this, they're disposable and biodegradable — this means less washing up for you, and you don’t have to feel guilty about it.
However, some people feel these filters give their coffee a papery flavor. This is something that some coffee lovers go their whole lives without noticing, but it’s worth keeping in mind if you consider your taste buds to be very finely attuned.
2. Metal Filter
Metal filters have been around for a long time but have seen a boost in popularity in recent years as an eco alternative to paper filters. Typically, metal filters are less fine than paper filters, meaning that the final brew can have a silty mouthfeel. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, and some people actively pursue that texture in coffee.
The main downside of metal filters is that although they’re easy to clean (you can throw most right into the dishwasher), even the best ones tend to clog over time.
3. Cloth Filter
Cloth filters are much less common than either of the other options on this list, but some prefer them as a compromise between paper and metal filters. Some aficionados find that they impart no flavor of their own and that they rarely (if ever) clog.
However, some people don’t like them because they're difficult to clean and remove coffee from. The typical advice is to rinse the cloth filter every day and wash it with soap once per week. Despite this seeming adequate, many people feel that it’s just not clean enough for something they’re essentially drinking through.
FAQs: Coffee & Chemex Brewers
Finally, let’s discuss some of the finer questions about brewing the best coffee possible with your Chemex.
1. What Is a Chemex?
A Chemex is a simple pour-over brewer that includes both a conical filter basket and a reservoir from which to pour freshly brewed coffee.
2. What Roast Is Best for a Chemex?
Experiment with medium and light roast coffees. With the long brew time of a Chemex, you can easily extract lighter flavor notes from light-roasted coffee beans. As beans are roasted darker, the longer brew time with Chemex may over-extract the flavors, leaving a burned, bitter flavor.
3. What Grind Is Best for a Chemex?
When grinding beans for your Chemex, the best philosophy is to start with a medium coarseness grind and then work from this point to dial in the perfect grind for your selected beans. You may find that because the Chemex brews so slowly, you need to grind more coarsely to prevent over-extraction.
4. What Type of Filter Should You Use for Your Chemex?
Paper filters are the most common filters used for Chemex coffee, largely because they let little to no coffee grounds through and result in quite a smooth mouthfeel. However, cloth filtration has become more popular recently.
5. What Key Tips Are Important to Bear in Mind When Using a Chemex?
Because the inner surface of the Chemex’s glass cone is smooth, you may find that a slight vacuum forms between the wet paper and the smooth glass. This can prevent your brew from extracting normally, so consider placing a chopstick in the pouring spout to break that seal and stop it from forming.
6. How Do You Brew Vietnamese Coffee in a Chemex?
When brewing Vietnamese with a Chemex, it’s important to avoid over-extraction, which may lead to burned, ashy flavors. Grinding these beans more coarsely and using slightly cooler water are good rules to follow. The final brew should be earthy and rich while also having the more delicate nuttiness of a good dark roast.
7. What Are Good Alternatives to a Chemex?
There are many alternative forms of pour-over brewers, including the Hario V60 and the Kalita Wave. While they’re great and typically produce wonderful coffee, here’s a more unusual recommendation — the Vietnamese phin drip filter. It’s a metal brewer that works much like any other but with a finer filter and a gravity weight to apply pressure as the brew is ongoing. This can result in very high extraction and unique enhancements to both flavor and mouthfeel.
8. What Are Some Good Chemex Hacks?
There are tons of pour-over coffee hacks, including adding spices to your coffee bed to get great flavors and agitating the brew during the percolation phase to increase extraction. Consider adding some high-quality dark chocolate to the glass base of your Chemex and brewing the coffee over it. The chocolate will melt, and you can create a tasty mocha-inspired coffee.
