What you need:
- Freshly roasted coffee
- Kitchen scale
- Timer
- Coffee grinder
- Chemex brewer
- Chemex filters
- Kettle for boiling/pouring water
What you do:
Use scale to measure out coffee and water for brewing. A good starting ratio of coffee to water is 1 to 16, and since we’ll be brewing 24oz of coffee with this recipe, we’ll be using 1.5oz of coffee, or 50 grams of coffee to 800 grams of water for you metric folks.
Boil water and grind coffee to medium coarse grind setting. Chemex requires a coarser grind than other pour over brewing methods due its use as a higher brew volume and its proprietary filter, which is 20-30% thicker than the average coffee filter. Both factors elongate brew time and coarsening the grind setting helps mitigate them.
Once water is boiling, place filter in Chemex and use hot water to rinse, then discard rinse water. This rids the filter of its papery taste and preheats your Chemex.
Add coffee to Chemex and shake to level brew bed. Place Chemex on top of scale and tare. Start timer and begin to pour water. The first pour should take around 15 seconds and amount to around 100g of water, double the amount of ground coffee. Pour in a circular motion to ensure all coffee is evenly saturated.
Allow coffee to off-gas, or bloom, until timer reads 1 minute.
When the timer reads 1 minute, add 100g of water in around 10-15 seconds, pouring in a circular motion and avoiding the edge of the Chemex. Allow coffee to drain for 10-15 seconds.
Repeat the same pattern (10-15 sec/100g pour with a 10-15 second drain) until the desired brew weight of 800g is reached. Once you’ve added 800g of water, allow the coffee to drain into your carafe. The entire process should take around 5-6 minutes.