To enhance the hydrogen production, we designed a plate-type reactor to investigate the effect of the catalyst activity distribution on methanol steam reforming. The methanol steam reforming performance on a commercial CuO/ZnO/Al2O3 catalyst in a packed bed and a coating bed were compared experimentally. We found that higher conversion was achieved for the coating bed of uniform axial catalyst distribution compared to the packed bed. The cold spot temperature difference is restricted by using a higher fraction of inert particles at the inlet of the reactor and using a lower fraction of inert particles near the outlet of the reactor. Alleviating the cold spot difference can contribute to the improvement of the reactor performance. The minimum temperature of 3 K was determined in the case of coating bed I. This improvement results from the use of the appropriate non-uniform catalyst distribution to induce a favorable interaction among the mass and heat transfers. The highest conversion of 96.26% was achieved at the inlet weight hourly space velocity of 0.97 h(-1) when the temperature was 543 K. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.