The excellent catalytic performance of zeolite capsule catalyst CuZnAl/SAPO11-PhyC derived from its special core–shell-like structure that provides a confined reaction field to STD reaction and at the same time suppresses the further deep dehydration of DME to form other hydrocarbon by-products. The presented methodology and application, in this report, will give new insight to preparing other zeolite capsule catalysts with a cost-saving and highly flexible manner. Furthermore, from a generalization point of view, the simple replication of such PhyC method into another tandem catalysis process that requires more than two different catalysts would also generate fully novel innovation