Now You See It, Now You Don't!
TellzAll's subject for July is the Coffee Percolator
Human beings have been drinking coffee for more than one thousand years now, but over the centuries there have been a variety of different methods for brewing the drink. In the late nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth century, one of the most common brewing methods, at least in the United States, involved the coffee percolator.
Prior to the invention of the coffee percolator, most people brewed their coffee by boiling the coffee grounds in water. Boiled coffee usually had a very bitter taste to it, and it was difficult to remove all of the grounds and sediment that resulted from the brewing process. The result was a gritty, sludgy brew that did not taste very good. By the nineteenth century, coffee drinkers in the United States and Europe were seeking improved methods for coffee brewing, with the hope of making the drink more palatable. Many people experimented with filters that tried to remove the grounds from the coffee, but others sought to develop entirely new brewing methods. Two of the most popular methods were vacuum-brewing and percolation.
Many people claim to have invented the coffee percolator, but a Frenchman by the name of Laurens often gets the credit for inventing the device in the early 1800s. Americans began using percolators in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the most common early versions of the American percolator was the Manning-Bowman pump percolator, although numerous Americans claimed credit for inventing the device. Coffee percolators have a tube that carries boiling water up and through a compartment at the top of the percolator where grounds are located. The water then trickles down through the grounds, infusing with the coffee before dripping down into the water below. Cooks would place early percolators on top of stove burners to heat, although in the 1930s manufacturers introduced the electric percolator the American market for the first time.
In the latter part of the twentieth century, percolators fell out of favor with most coffee drinkers, although there are still some people who still use them today. Most coffee drinkers found that the coffee made by percolators was still bitter, because the coffee boils repeatedly during the brewing process. As a result, most Americans make coffee using the automatic drip coffee maker, which was first invented in the early 1970s.
