Abstract Determination of the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of vortex beams has been hotly discussed. We propose a new type of method to determine the orbital angular momentum of photons, filtering. We present an OAM filter scheme which consists of a cavity with a polarization-based Mach–Zehnder interferometer inside. Our scheme can purify the specific OAM with unitary efficiency theoretically without the pre-knowledge of the OAM spectrum of the input light. We also implemented a proof-of-principle experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of our scheme by cascading three interferometers. Our method offers a new way to determine the OAM spectrum of a light and this method can also be exploited to prepare the eigenstate of vortex beams.