Cafetière vs filter coffee: which should you actually buy?

Most people end up with whichever one they were given. A cafetière from a house move, a filter machine inherited from a kitchen someone was clearing out. Then they spend years assuming their coffee is as good as it gets.

These two methods produce noticeably different cups from identical beans. Neither is better. They are aimed at different things, and knowing which is which will tell you what to buy — or explain what you have been drinking all this time.

The one difference everything else follows from

A cafetière strains your coffee through a metal mesh. A filter brewer strains it through paper.

That is it. Everything below comes out of that one fact.

Metal mesh has holes big enough to let two things through that paper stops: the coffee’s natural oils, and the very fine particles known as fines. Paper catches both.

So:

A cafetière gives you body. The oils carry weight and texture, and the fines add a slight opacity and grit. The cup is heavier, rounder and fuller in the mouth. It also has a little sediment at the bottom, which is not a fault — it is the method working as designed.

A filter gives you clarity. With the oils and fines removed, the individual flavours in the coffee separate out and become easier to pick apart. The cup is lighter in the mouth, cleaner, and often tastes noticeably more acidic and fruity from the same beans. There is no sediment at all.

Same coffee, same water, same dose. Two cups that a blindfolded drinker would not guess came from the same bag.

Which suits you

Get a cafetière if you like a big, heavy, satisfying mug, usually with milk. If you are making coffee for three or four people at once. If you do not want to buy paper filters forever. If you want to be able to make coffee having read one paragraph of instructions.

Get a filter brewer if you drink your coffee black and want to actually taste what is different about one bag against another. If you enjoy the ritual and do not mind that pouring takes three minutes of attention. If sediment bothers you.

For most people starting out — and particularly for anyone drinking coffee with milk — the cafetière is the sensible first buy. It is more forgiving, it needs nothing you have to keep replacing, and the extra body stands up to milk far better. Pour-over rewards attention, and punishes inattention with sour, thin coffee.

Getting the best from a cafetière

The single biggest mistake is grinding too fine. Fine grounds slip through the mesh and keep extracting in the jug, and by your second cup it is bitter and silty.

• Grind coarse. Like sea salt. Coarser than you think.
• 17g of coffee per 250ml of water. For a standard three-cup cafetière, that is about 30g to 450ml.
• Water just off the boil, around 94°C. Straight from a boiling kettle is too hot — wait 30 seconds.
• Bloom first. Add just enough water to wet the grounds, wait 30 seconds, then fill.
• Four minutes, lid on, plunger up.
• Break the crust, then skim off the foam and floating grounds with a spoon. This is the step everyone skips and it removes a surprising amount of the bitterness.
• Plunge slowly — 20 seconds, no forcing.
• Pour it all out immediately. Coffee left sitting on the grounds keeps extracting and turns harsh. If you are not drinking it all, decant it into a jug or flask.

That last point is the second biggest mistake. A cafetière is not a storage vessel.

Campfire Blend is the one we would point a cafetière drinker at first — a medium roast with enough body to make the most of the method. And if you take a dark roast in yours and find it harsh, a pinch of salt in the grounds fixes that in a way sugar never will.

Getting the best from a filter

Pour-over is less forgiving and more rewarding. The variables are the same but they bite harder.

• Grind medium. Like granulated sugar.
• 60g of coffee per litre, which is 15g to 250ml. Slightly less coffee than a cafetière for the same water.
• Rinse the paper first with hot water and tip it away. Unrinsed paper genuinely tastes of paper, and it warms the brewer at the same time.
• Bloom for 30 to 45 seconds with about twice the water as you have coffee — 30g of water for 15g of coffee.
• Pour in slow, even circles, keeping the bed level. Do not pour down the sides.
• Aim for two and a half to three and a half minutes in total. Much faster and it will taste sour and thin; much slower and it will taste bitter and dry.

If it is running too fast, grind finer. Too slow, grind coarser. That is the whole feedback loop, and it is the reason grind size matters more here than anywhere else. Our grind size guide goes further into it.

Morning Roundup is the one that shows off what a filter does — the citrus and brown sugar in it come through far more clearly through paper than through mesh.

What about cost

A cafetière is £15 to £30 and needs nothing else, ever. A V60 or similar is £8 to £25 plus papers, which run to a couple of pence a cup.

Neither is expensive. But if you are choosing where to put £30, put it into a burr grinder before either of them. Pre-ground coffee starts losing its aromatics within minutes of grinding, and the difference between a fresh grind and a bag that was ground three weeks ago is larger than the difference between any two brew methods on this page. Buy the grinder, then worry about the brewer.

Whichever way you go, get the ratio right first. Our brewing calculator will do the arithmetic for whatever size cup you are actually making, and the full guide to coffee-to-water ratios explains why the number matters so much.

The short version

Cafetière for body, ease and making a pot. Filter for clarity, control and tasting what a coffee is really doing.

If you have both, use the cafetière on weekday mornings and the filter at the weekend when you have the patience. That is what most of us end up doing anyway.