r/chemex

i’ve been brewing with Chemex for almost 2 years in the South Bay of Los Angeles, and I love the coffee. What I don’t love is the day and a half trek all around the city to try to find a new box of filters every time I run out. Everyone always has suggestions as to where they’re carried: Crate & Barrel, World Market, Klatch, Verve. And on paper, all those places carry them, but in practice, they are always out of stock. What’s the secret password? What’s the secret hidden away store that actually carries the filters I want (bleached, I don’t care about shape)? I know I can order them direct from the company, but with shipping that costs twice as much as the box does in the store.

For months I was chasing that clean, bright cup that everyone describes when they talk about Chemex brewing, and I kept landing somewhere between thin and weirdly bitter. I followed the standard advice pretty faithfully: grind similar to coarse sea salt, water around 200 degrees, slow controlled pours. The coffee was fine but it never matched what I expected.

On a whim I pushed my grinder two full steps coarser than my usual setting, mostly out of frustration. The brew time stretched out a bit longer than the 4-minute target I had been aiming for, closer to 4:45 with a 30g dose into 500g of water. The resulting cup was noticeably sweeter and the clarity was actually better, not worse. I had assumed a longer draw-down meant over-extraction but apparently my grind was choking things off in a way that created uneven extraction.

A few things I noticed after dialing in from that starting point:

• The bloom matters more than I gave it credit for. Letting it go a full 45 seconds instead of rushing through it seems to make the subsequent pours more predictable.
• Pour height affects turbulence in a way that actually shows up in the cup. Lower and slower gives more control on the cone.
• Freshness of the coffee compounds everything. Beans past three weeks off roast were exposing all my technique flaws more harshly.

Curious whether anyone else landed on a grind setting significantly coarser than the guides suggest. I wonder if grinder variability accounts for a lot of the conflicting advice out there, or whether it is more about the specific beans.

Been using a 6-cup Chemex for about eight months now and for most of that time I was convinced my grinder was the problem. Every cup came out thin and sour no matter what I did, and I kept reading that the solution was a better burr grinder. So I blamed my equipment and moved on, more or less accepting mediocre coffee.

Turns out the grinder was fine. The actual issue was my water temperature and my bloom time, both of which I had never taken seriously.

I was using water straight off the boil, somewhere around 100C, and blooming for only about 30 seconds. Once I started letting the kettle sit for a minute and a half off the stove (landing around 93-94C based on my thermometer) and extending the bloom to 45 seconds with twice the coffee weight in water, the sourness almost completely disappeared. The extraction just tasted fuller and more balanced.

A few other things that helped once I fixed the fundamentals:

• Pouring slower during the main pour than I thought was necessary. I was rushing it.
• Keeping the grind slightly coarser than most guides suggested. My tap water is quite soft and I think that plays a role.
• Preheating the Chemex properly, not just a quick rinse but actually letting hot water sit in it for a minute.

Curious whether others with soft water have noticed they need to adjust differently than the standard recommendations. Everything I read online seems calibrated for harder water and my results have consistently pointed in that direction.

I grind 30 grams of beans with Ozo grinder at #8 setting. I have been pouring 800 grams of water. Would I get a better taste with 750 grams of water? Not sure of amount of water to bloom and how long before I add more water. Thanks