“Most people have no idea there’s plastic in their coffee filter. Or in their tea bag.” – Why a 76-year-old North Carolina potter is selling his last ceramic filters at a special price

For two winters, Arlis Cagle fired filter after filter in his Seagrove workshop until he had one that holds back the grounds with nothing but ceramic. Now arthritis has taken his hands, and the last 167 sets are going out before his studio closes on November 30.

Every morning for over forty years, Loretta Cagle did the same thing. She set a little plastic cone on her mug, folded a paper filter into it, spooned in the coffee and poured the water straight off the boil. In the afternoon she made tea, two bags in the brown pot. Her husband Arlis never thought twice about either. Neither did anybody else in their kitchen.

Then, one evening in early 2023, their granddaughter Shelby sat at the kitchen table with her phone and a box of tea bags and said something that changed the last years of Arlis’s working life.

“Grandpa, did you know there’s plastic in these?”

Arlis is 76. He has been making pottery in Seagrove, North Carolina, a town that has lived off its kilns for more than two hundred years, since he was eighteen. He knows what happens to materials in heat better than almost anyone. And what Shelby showed him that night bothered him enough to spend two winters solving it.

The Plastic Nobody Mentions

Most people think of a tea bag as paper and a coffee filter as paper. Neither is quite true.

Many tea bags are sealed with polypropylene, a plastic that keeps the bag from falling apart in boiling water. The “silky” pyramid bags are often nylon or PET outright. And the newer “plant-based” bags are mostly PLA, which the British consumer group Which? put plainly: it is “still a type of plastic.” In a 2019 lab study at McGill University, a single plastic tea bag steeped at brewing temperature released billions of micro- and nanoplastic particles into the cup.

Paper coffee filters have the same problem in a quieter form. Plain paper turns to mush in hot water, so most filters are made with plastic-based resins that hold the fibers together while you pour water just off the boil through them. It says nothing about that on the box.

And then there are PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals. They are used to help paper and packaging stand up to water and grease, and an independent lab test found PFAS markers in a popular brand of paper coffee filters. Most people have never heard the word in connection with their morning cup, or their tea bags.

“That’s what got me,” Arlis says. “Not that it’s there. That nobody tells you. You pour water at two hundred degrees through it every morning of your life and you don’t even know what it’s made of.”

Shelby did the math for her grandmother: two cups of coffee and three cups of tea a day, for forty-odd years. That is somewhere around seventy thousand filters and bags. Every one of them used once, thrown away, and bought again.

What His Grandfather Kept in the Corner

Arlis didn’t need a laboratory to find the answer. He needed to remember his grandfather’s kitchen.

In the corner stood a tall ceramic water crock with a spigot at the bottom. Inside was a fired ceramic filter. Water went in at the top, seeped through the stone-hard walls and came out clean at the bottom. Nobody ever replaced it. It had been there before Arlis was born.

He was right about the history. Henry Doulton built porous ceramic water filters in London from 1827, and Queen Victoria had one at Balmoral. The paper coffee filter wasn’t invented until 1908. The tea bag only took over the kitchen in the second half of the twentieth century. For most of history, the thing between you and your drink was something you kept for life.

Two Winters and 300 Firings

“If water can run through ceramic,” Arlis told Shelby, “so can coffee.” Getting there took two winters, after the regular pottery orders were done.

The hard part was the pores. Too coarse, and the grounds came through and the coffee tasted of sludge. Too tight, and the water sat on top and went cold. Arlis mixed a fine ceramic body, pressed each filter by hand into a small cone, let it dry and fired it hot enough to turn it stone-hard without closing it up. He left it unglazed on purpose. A glaze would seal the pores shut.

The minerals in the mix and the heat of the kiln turn every filter the same deep charcoal grey. Inside, it feels like fine stone. Through the walls run thousands of pores far smaller than a grain of coffee.

He went through more than 300 firings before he made one he would sell. Loretta was his tester. Every morning she got a new filter on her mug, and every morning she told him what was wrong with it. “She was harder on those filters than any customer,” Arlis says. “When she stopped complaining, I knew I had it.”

The Filter Is the Ceramic

This is the part people misunderstand. Lots of shops sell a ceramic cone that still needs a paper filter inside. Arlis’s doesn’t. The ceramic itself is the filter. There is no paper, no metal mesh, no plastic ring, nothing to replace.

• Nothing but fired ceramic. No paper, no plastic, no glue, no mesh. Hot water touches ceramic and coffee, nothing else.
• Fine pores, clean cup. The grounds stay in the filter. What reaches the mug is coffee, not sludge.
• Made for one perfect cup. At 3.35 inches across and 2.1 inches tall, it sits right on top of most standard mugs and holds about two tablespoons of coffee. Arlis never made a pot-sized one. “Nobody drinks a whole pot alone,” he says.
• Two in every set. One for coffee, one for tea, so neither picks up the taste of the other. Or one in use while the other dries.

How It Works

Arlis built it to be no more work than a paper filter, and Loretta held him to that.

Afterward you tap the grounds into the trash or the compost and rinse the filter under the hot tap. No soap: ceramic soaks it up, and you would taste it in the next cup. Every couple of weeks, Arlis boils his for ten minutes in a pot of water with a spoonful of baking soda. That keeps the pores open, and it is the whole secret to a filter that stays fast for years.

“I’ve Thrown Out Every Reusable Filter I’ve Ever Bought”

Renée Whitfield has roasted coffee in Asheville for 22 years, and she has heard every promise a reusable filter can make. “Metal mesh lets the fine grounds through and leaves that muddy bottom in the cup,” she says. “Cloth starts to smell. I’ve thrown them all out and gone back to paper.”

Shelby sent her two of her grandfather’s filters. Renée brewed the same coffee through paper and through ceramic, side by side. “I expected sludge,” she says. “I got a clean cup. No grounds, no metal taste, no paper taste either. I kept one by my own kettle.”

Here is how it compares with what most kitchens already use:

Coffee in the Morning, Tea in the Afternoon

Loretta still drinks both, and that is why every set has two filters. One stays the coffee filter. The other is her tea filter: a teaspoon of loose-leaf tea in the ceramic, hot water over it, and a few minutes later a clear cup with not a single leaf floating in it. No bag, no string, no little paper tag.

“She hasn’t bought a box of tea bags or a pack of filters since the first good one came out of the kiln,” Arlis says. “That was the whole idea.”

Why the Last Ones Are Half Price

Arlis pressed and fired every filter himself, a few dozen at a time, the same way he has made his pottery for 58 years. Since spring 2025, about 1,300 sets have gone out, first from the shelf in his studio and then by mail once Shelby started taking orders online.

This summer the arthritis in his hands got bad enough that he couldn’t press the cones evenly anymore. “If the wall isn’t even, the water finds the thin spot and runs straight through,” he says. “Some mornings now I can’t close my hand. I won’t send out a filter I can’t stand behind.”

So the studio closes on November 30. Shelby, 20, who packs every order, counted what is left: 167 finished sets, each one tested with a cup of coffee before it went in the box. There won’t be more.

What the First Owners Say

The Questions Readers Keep Asking

“Fifty-eight years I’ve made things people keep. I reckon these two filters will outlast every box of paper you’d have bought.”
Arlis Cagle, Cagle Pottery, Seagrove, North Carolina