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Ask Wirecutter, an advice column written by Annemarie Conte, explores the best approaches to buying, using, and maintaining stuff. Email your biggest product-related problems to askwirecutter@wirecutter.com.

My husband loves Chemex pour-over coffee, but the carafe doesn’t keep the coffee hot the way a traditional coffee maker does, and I refuse to drink it lukewarm. What are my options, besides microwaving the room-temp coffee?

I get the appeal of a Chemex. It brews an excellent cup of coffee, and the pour-over process can feel intentional and meditative in a world of single-serving pods and to-go cups. “The magic of the Chemex is that it isn’t that difficult to use, but the process gives you proper filtration—not too fast, not too slow—to remove undesirable elements from the coffee,” Eliza Grassy, who co-owns Chemex with her brother, told me in an interview. “There’s no bitterness or acidity, and it gets the pure flavor and nuances of the coffee.” I mean, obviously she feels that way—she owns the place!—but our experts agree: In our tests the Chemex produced balanced, nuanced coffee. You can read more in our review of gear for making great pour-over coffee.

As gorgeous as it is usable, the Chemex makes several cups at once, and it produced a delicious, bright brew that our testers loved.

The glass carafe is made of high-quality borosilicate glass, which doesn’t crack under temperature swings. But it’s not insulated, so it does start to lose heat before you’ve even finished brewing the pot. That’s a dealbreaker for some coffee drinkers.

“Unless I resign myself to swilling room-temperature coffee all afternoon (gross) or reheating each cup in the microwave (not ideal), I have to brew one cup at a time if I want my third or fourth cup to be as hot as the first. That’s a lot of effort and coffee filters,” says senior staff writer Lesley Stockton in her article decrying the Chemex.

Chemex founder Peter Schlumbohm actually designed the Chemex so that coffee could be stored in the carafe and reheated. That was over 80 years ago, though. Grassy told me Chemex still includes tips for reheating coffee, but the topic “just doesn’t come up much.” But plenty of coffee drinkers obviously don’t want to reheat their coffee because doing so changes its chemical makeup and makes it bitter.

“The well-established bias against heating or reheating brewed coffee probably comes from commercial brewers and home drip machines with those hot plates that are known to make bad coffee taste worse,” said Tony Konecny, founder of Yes Plz coffee company, in an email interview. “These methods are holding, or even worse, returning the coffee very close to its original brewing temperature where the flavor chemistry is most likely to keep changing — and not for the better.”

So R.L., what’s the point in your husband lovingly crafting pour-over coffee only to destroy it by reheating it? (I’m just going to assume your husband is the type of person who also uses a Baratza Encore Coffee Grinder and then weighs his grinds on an Escali Primo Digital Kitchen Scale.) You seem to be committed to this long-term relationship with your spouse (and therefore, his Chemex), so let’s see what warming tricks we have up our sleeves.

As I was doing some testing to answer this question for you, I realized that I don’t own an electric kettle that holds water at temperature for 30 minutes—an important feature of both our top-pick kettle, the Cuisinart CPK-17 PerfecTemp Cordless Electric Kettle, and our new gooseneck pick, the Cuisinart GK-1 Digital Gooseneck Kettle, from our guide to electric kettles. What that means is that my 200 °F water was rapidly losing heat over the four to five minutes it took me to brew a pot of Chemex coffee, which results in 1) cooler coffee and 2) less delicious coffee because colder water doesn’t extract the coffee from the grounds as fully. My last pour was 195 °F, at the bottom edge of the ideal brew temperature range of 195 °F to 205 °F (and if you’re slow to brew, your water will most certainly drop below the ideal brew temp).

For anyone preparing pour-over coffee, we recommend this precise-aim gooseneck kettle for its temperature accuracy and its ability to hold water at temp for 30 minutes.

Before you brew, pour boiling water into your Chemex carafe and let it sit for a minute or two. Dump it out when you’re ready to brew, and the warmed glass will prevent the coffee from losing heat as quickly.

“Letting your coffee cool to just a hair above your drinking temp and tossing it into a thermal carafe is ideal,” said Konecny. “Really good coffee tends to taste even better as it cools. Really bad coffee tends to taste worse. Super hot coffee can cover some sins and I think the reason a lot of folks obsess over keeping coffee very hot is they’re using mediocre, stale, or poorly roasted beans.” The top-ranked drinking temperature is 155 °F, according to the Journal of Food Science (PDF). Or, you know, when you take a sip and don’t scald your mouth.

Our staff loves the Zojirushi Stainless Mug, which kept drinks hot for hours in our testing and comes in 12-, 16-, and 20-ounce versions. Preheat the mug with boiling water in the same way we recommend preheating your carafe, brew your coffee, pour a cup for immediate drinking, and hold the rest at drinking temp in the biggest Zoji until you’re ready for it. And although we love this particular Wirecutter pick, any travel mug that’s double-wall insulated should do the trick—Chemex sells its own branded insulated mugs in 16- and 33-ounce sizes for this purpose.

The Zojirushi offers amazing heat retention, one-handed usability, and a locking, leakproof lid.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $32.

Another good option is a mug warmer to keep your mug and the stuff it holds in the 130 °F to 140 °F range. We like the Bestinnkits Smart Coffee Warmer, but we have a few other options in our article on mug warmers.

One thing to note when plotting out your coffee consumption is that Chemex, like much of the coffee industry, considers a cup to be 5 ounces, not the standard 8 ounces. So its six-cup coffee maker, for example, should make around 30 ounces, and its eight-cup carafe should make around 40 ounces (with a margin of error for water that the grounds soak up).

The Chemex’s glass is designed to take direct heat, so you can also keep your coffee warm on the stove. If you’re going to put your Chemex carafe on a burner, though, make sure you have coffee in it first to prevent the glass from cracking. The carafe should be fine over a low flame on a gas stove, but if your burners are too powerful, you can instead boil a pot of water on the stove, turn off the flame, and then place the coffee-filled carafe in the pot of water to keep it warm. Just have a kitchen towel nearby to wipe off the drippy carafe when you pull it out of its hot tub.

For anyone with an electric stove, Chemex makes a stainless steel wire grid that helps diffuse the heat and prevent breakage. You can put a full carafe directly on a glass-topped electric range, but unfortunately, it won’t work with an induction burner, though you could use the same water-bath method there as on a gas stove.

In addition to brewing your coffee at the correct temperature, using a few add-ons can help your carafe stay snuggly. Etsy abounds with Chemex cozies in cotton, wool, or acrylic. And Chemex’s own Glass Coffeemaker Cover is sized to fit your carafe and help prevent evaporation. (Free alternatives: a towel or scarf and any lid that fits.)

A company called Hexnub also makes a variety of Chemex accessories, including a bamboo lid and a zip-front neoprene cozy. I tested the heat loss of an unadorned pre-warmed Chemex against the carafe outfitted in Hexnub’s lid and cozy, which I bought as a bundle. I used an instant-read thermometer to check the temperature of a full eight-cup carafe of 200 °F liquid every 15 minutes for 90 minutes. Although both lost heat at about the same rate, the dressed-up Chemex ended up at 145 °F, whereas the nudie carafe’s coffee was nearly 20 degrees cooler at 123 °F.

I had a romance with a Chemex before I swapped it for Wirecutter’s top-pick coffee maker, the OXO Brew 9-Cup Coffee Maker, which I’m long-term testing. The OXO model is beautiful and easy to use, and its insulated carafe keeps coffee hot for hours. My one complaint is that the top of the carafe holds on to a bit of coffee, so I always rinse it out and let it drain once before I brew the next pot. I also prop open the water tank after the coffee is done brewing to let it dry out a little. (I should note, though, that after working on this article, I’m considering going back to the Chemex at least occasionally because it produces the only at-home coffee I can drink black without gagging.)

This stylish brewer makes consistently good coffee and has a solid thermal carafe. And you can program it to brew automatically before you wake up.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $230.

Chemex’s Ottomatic automatic brewer retails for around $350 (or $50 less if you already own a carafe) and brews both hot and cold coffee by mimicking pour-over with the greedy-cup method (video), which is a very cool thing Pythagoras invented that I had not heard of until Grassy told me about it. Wirecutter has not tested the Ottomatic machine, so we can’t vouch for its quality or efficacy, but senior editor Marguerite Preston notes that though the brewer appears to meet the standards set by the Specialty Coffee Association trade group—something we look for in our research for our guide to drip coffee makers—it isn’t SCA-certified. I followed up with Grassy, who told me that Chemex hasn’t submitted the Ottomatic brewer for review yet. We plan to test this machine (and Chemex’s claim that the hot plate turns off after 90 minutes and doesn’t cause the coffee to burn) a little later this year, and we’ll report back with the results.

Now, go enjoy a steamy cup of joe before cold-brew season rolls around.

This article was edited by Jason Chen.

Wirecutter staffers talk about the coffee beans they get delivered on the regular.

We tasted over 150 cups of coffee to find the best pour-over setup, from an easy-to-use dripper to a reliable coffee grinder and scale.

We’ve been testing coffee grinders since 2015 and have yet to find a better value than the consistent, reliable, and repairable Baratza Encore.

We think the easiest way to make good coffee is with the OXO Brew 9 Cup Coffee Maker. We also have picks for a budget option, an espresso machine, and more.

A personal essay on why the Chemex is not the best choice of coffee maker for someone who drinks single servings of coffee.

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