I vividly remember the Joe Dimaggio ads for Mr. Coffee in the early 70’s. It was an aggressive ad campaign and it completely changed brewing coffee at home within a few years. Percolator sales dropped quickly and most homes replaced the ones they had.
What took so long? Were there technological problems in manufacturing? Why weren’t automatic drip pots sold in the late 40’s? The late 40’s seems to be when most home gadgets came out (electric skillet, electric pop up toasters, electric percolators, and even the Sunbeam cooking pot (my mom had).
I think commercial drip pots came first? Like the Bunnwith the preheated water reservoir. There were also the huge coffee urns but weren’t they percolators? Can’t recall if the older urns came in drip or not.
Isn’t the drip coffee method older than electrical appliances? My mom had a Corning Ware drip pot in the 60’s. You poured boiling water through it. I used it in college and it made great coffee.
I remember when they came out also. I think we even got my Mom one for Mothers Day that year.
An IMHO answer, but as you mention, the drip coffee makers (mostly Melita I think) had been out for years, and I would venture to say the Mr Coffee wasn’t much of an improvement, it saves one measly step pouring the hot water for you. I still use a simple drip maker, I like my coffee fresh, and I am the only one that drinks coffee in the household anyway. Maybe no one thought it would be a big deal.
Now that I think about that scenario though it is crazy. Anytime a new automated gadget is introduced people buy them like crazy, never mind the utility of the automation. Any appliance manufacturer would have been crazy not to make one if they thought of it. It is guaranteed sales for a couple years even if it is a completely useless item.
No one thought of it as a consumer item before Mr Coffee (edit: one Vincent Marotta, Sr. according to the wiki) is my new guess.
The drip coffee maker (manual pour-over) was patented in 1908 by Melitta Bentz, a German housewife. Bunn introduced the first automatic drip coffeemaker in 1957, but it was impractical for home use, as it required a constantly heated reservoir. They also introduced the pre-fluted flat-bottomed paper filters that are still in use.
In 1965, Melitta introduced a home electric drip coffeemaker. Until a device which could rapidly heat and gradually deliver near-boiling water, home automatic drip coffeemakers were not practical. I don’t remember what kind of water feed they used at first. Mr. Coffee, the first American home automatic drip coffeemaker, introduced a gravity-fed on-demand heating element, which they eventually replaced with the thermosyphon that they - and nearly all such coffeemakers - still use.I kind-a sort-a remember that they used fluted filters, like the Bunn-O-Matic.
In the '60s, my parents made drip coffee in a pot fitted with a simple plastic funnel with a huge hole in the bottom - about 1.5 inches. The filter was a simple round paper one, folded into quarters. It was basically the same a chemist’s filter funnel. When I was a little older, I remember Melitta making a big push for their coffee sets; there was a plastic molded cone with a tiny hole, a formed paper filter with a flat bottom seam to fit the cone, and a carafe that fit with the cone. They have been using that design since 1937, but were apparently not big in the U.S. I think maybe they were pushing their automatic machines at the same time, but I just don’t remember what came when.
“There is a great dividing year in the history of coffee in America, and it is 1972. Before it, the percolator. After, automatic drip…
Mr. Coffee changed all that. That is, two old friends from Cleveland, Vincent Marotta Sr. and Samuel Glazer, did. They got the idea of adapting an industrial coffeemaker for home use, hired engineers to invent it, called it “Mr. Coffee,” marketed it vigorously and in a couple years sent the nation’s percolators out to the garage.”
I still own Melitta non plug in drip coffe maker that I bought over 10 years ago on sale at Albertsons on clearance for $8. No heater, no warmer. Absolute simplicity
Just a plastic funnel type thing where you put a #4 filter and coffee in. Over a glass receptacle. Bring water in a kettle to almost boiling, Pour it over the coffee grounds and the water passes through a small hole into the 8 cup receptacle. The whole process takes about 5 minutes and makes delicious coffee.
The whole thing can be placed in a dishwasher and cleaned that way. Or hand wash it. Still looks like brand new and can never break (unless I drop and break it).
Got away from the Mister Coffee type drip makers because of how disgustingly slimy they could get on the inside and very difficult to clean. And they would eventually stop working.
Have never seen what I own for sale since I bought it. I think the reason was a liability problem. (Probably why it was on clearance then). Someone might get scalded by pouring the boiling water from the kettle and maybe bumping the whole thing over. (It is a little top heavy with coffee in it)
That is a good point. Percolators required a fine grind of coffee. I don’t think they required as much per pot either.
I remember when the grocery store still sold fine and medium grinds of coffee. Medium was for drip pots. Now you can’t buy fine grind anymore unless you buy the beans and grind yourself.
I had a horrible experience with Mr. Coffee in the early 80’s. I took off the little top insert to clean the tank. Found three bleached white roach bodies. :eek: Yeah I wanted to puke. Mr. Coffee went into the trash. I got a Hamilton Beach with a tank that was exposed when I remove the lid and added water. I could check for any critters before adding water.
My family was the first in the neighborhood to get an automatic drip, in the 70s.
But not Mr Coffee.
It was a Bunn.
A small restaurant/snack0shop model, with one heating pad, all metal works, & nifty copper-plated outsides.
Mom had everybody in the neighborhood over for coffee, to show it off.
The industry heavily promoted the drip coffee makers because they make them more money, in 2 ways:
drip pots use up more coffee per brewing. Thus they sell more coffee. Also, it’s harder to re-use the grounds in a drip pot than in a percolator.
drip pots created a new market for a product (filters) that consumers have to buy continuously. Previously, they just had to buy coffee; now coffee + filters.
You can see an even further extension of this, in newer coffee makers that use a pre-made ‘pod’ of coffee – yet another consumable that the customer will have to buy continuously. Some companies are even trying to restrict these via patent/trademark, so that consumers can’t buy generic ones or refillable ones.
I don’t like coffee and never have but my older siblings all did. I too remember them getting Mr. Coffees in the 70s (can’t say I remember them use percolators before that though). Anyway, I just wanted to say that although they were immensely popular thru the 80s, all my brothers & sisters constantly said that Mr. Coffees made probably the worst tasting coffee ever! By the 90s they had all switched to home bean grinders and decanters with a funnel on top with the paper over metal screen filters that you just poured boiling water into from a stove kettle. Said they made coffee comparable in taste to the big restaurant machines.
4 Cup Capacity / Weight: 1 pound 13.4 ounces including internals and pot.
Dimensions: Upper bowl: 4¼" Round at base - All parts: 10" Tall
How to use the P-114 Drip Coffee Maker:
Heat water in the base that looks just like the P-104.
Place coffee grounds in basket, screw to bottom of glass bowl.
Insert plastic valve into glass bowl to seal opening at bottom.
Pour hot water to the 4 cup line, discard any extra water.
Remove lid from base and place filled assembly on top of pot.
Remove plastic valve to start water dripping and place lid on top of bowl.
Brewing takes about 5 minutes.
Remove basket / bowl assembly and replace lid on base.
Pour and enjoy a perfect Cuppa Joe.
Even I would say ‘meh’ to that; a lot of people bought circular paper filters for their percolators and (IIRC) some were designed that way, having relatively large holes in the basket and meant to be used only with a filter. Diners and restaurants had been using filter-based drip makers for decades, too, and the filter design was open-market and made by many manufacturers, more so after it became a consumer item.
For properly-made coffee, percs and drips use about the same amount of grind. You can get by with less grind in a percolator by letting it run longer, but at the expense of brew quality.
“Some” being the originator and, until very recently, only maker, Keurig. The K-cup model was patented from the beginning but those on the pod design recently ran out, which is why there is a plethora of other brands and generic fills. Keurig’s v2.0 model uses a different cup style with a code system to prevent aftermarket pod use.
Which makes it even more clear that for all the minor advantages of the one-cup makers (in the home), Keurig consumer products are more about the lock on the refill market than anything else. Even the putative Mr Coffee model didn’t lock you to one brand of filters or coffee.
A brand new Mr Coffee made pretty good coffee, because the drip system is infinitely superior to the recirculating percolation system. The problem is that it has to have absolute control of the drip water temperature and flow, and while a restaurant-grade dripper would hold those parameters for a long time (even indefinitely), MC’s went out of spec within months - and that’s probably being generous.
MC’s had no absolute control of brew temperature the way modern drippers do (using a heating/pump system from a reservoir); the water just heated and dripped by gravity and could come out any temp from about 135 to boiling. Once the element went off-spec and the drip hole either enlarged from wear or closed up from sediment, it got a lot worse.
Things like Melitta, Chemex and the automated versions of them like Technivorm make excellent coffee, pot after pot - the latter because it’s designed to hold brew temp and flow precisely for its lifetime, not a few weeks. The manual ones need some skill and monitoring of the pour temp, as do french presses.
[QUOTE=Amateur Barbarian]
The K-cup model was patented from the beginning but those on the pod design recently ran out, which is why there is a plethora of other brands and generic fills. Keurig’s v2.0 model uses a different cup style with a code system to prevent aftermarket pod use.
[/QUOTE]
Ugh! DRM comes to coffee? Guess I’ll add this to another reason not to buy a Keurig machine, the others being it makes a weak and tepid coffee and the environmental disaster of all those plastic/foil/paper pods that can’t (curently) be recycled.
I’m surprised they’re not following the razor blade or cheap inkjet printer marketing strategy where they’d give away the machines and hope to get you locked into their consumables.
As for coffee maker filters, meh, a small expense. $1.25 for a package of 200. That’s .6 cents per filter. Even if you brew a pot a day, a package will still last you more than six months.
Pretty much. A new physical patented design would be enough but it would be hard to stop things like fill-yer-own pods from popping up, so the v2 cups apparently have some kind of authorization code printed on them. Not sure of the details but “DRM for coffee” is pretty apt.
I think that was the initial strategy, since the patents were approaching expiration when the system was pushed into the American market. The ease of creating aftermarket and reusable pods probably knocked their expected revenue down quite a bit.
I was a flat-out junkie during my 20s/working writer phase, and two pots plus the odd cup was all I could get down. You’re saying they drink 50-60 standard cups or 25-30 mugs a day…
Lonesome Polecat and Hairless Joe were known to throw an entire horse into their Kickapoo Joy Juice brew (for body), along with a typewriter (for vitamins A to Z). I’m sure your three roaches must have made some small contribution in vitamins and minerals. If you’re still healthy today, you probably didn’t develop Mad Roach Disease.
