The Walkure Karlsbader, also spelled Karlsbader Kanne, is a paper-free German brewer first produced by the Bavarian porcelain maker Walkure in the late nineteenth century. It became popular in the spa town of Karlsbad (today Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic), which gave it the name. Almost every part of it is porcelain — the body, the two-part filter, even the lid — which is both its selling point and the reason it is so specific.
Brewing is almost surreal in its simplicity. Coarsely ground coffee sits in a double-layer perforated porcelain filter set inside the pot. Hot water is poured over it in two or three pours, it drains very slowly through thousands of tiny holes, and the coffee pools in the lower chamber. No paper, no metal mesh, no bypass. The cup that results is startlingly clean — closer to a pour-over than the hardware suggests — but with a mouthfeel that carries more body because the porcelain lets through trace oils.
A sensible recipe: 20 g of coffee to 300 g of water (1:15), a grind between French press and V60, water at 93–95 °C, two pours totalling 300 g over 30 seconds of active pouring, with a total drawdown time of 4 to 5 minutes. Preheat the pot before brewing — porcelain has significant thermal mass and a cold Walkure can drop water temperature by five degrees before extraction even starts.
