Back in the day, when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, mom had a percolator. I remember eating breakfast as I listened to its “Burrrp…burrrp…burrp,” contendedly.
And so did everyone else. That was a feature of the 1960s kitchen – the coffee percolator.
Today, of course, we have drip coffee makers, coffee presses, perhaps an automated Keurig system… no percs, though.
Why? And if the answer is, “Because they make worse coffee compared to drip makers,” then the follow-up question is: drip coffee makers do not seem like the height of advanced technology. Didn’t our engineering ancestors make in the 1960s know how to make hot water drip?
I still see stove-top percolators all the time… they’re popular for camping, so when they’re not in the housewares section of a discount store, they’re often in the sporting goods section.
Haven’t seen electric percs new in-store for a while, but Googling shows they’re still available, and one coffee-themed business even has a devoted storefront. I notice caterers still use large ones, too. I do think that the rise in popularity (and lowering in prices) of more sophisticated home coffee makers has relegated percs to specialty status.
You have the first part of your answer already, although some obviously disagree. Percolators make inferior coffee. But IIRC they are faster than drip, and have a smaller counter footprint.
Percolated coffee is nasty. It’s boiled and re-boiled until it tastes like coffee beans removed from Satan’s butthole. Boiling coffee destroys all the delicious aromas and essential oils and leaves the bitter tannins.
I would surmise that they didn’t have drip coffee machines back in the 60’s because it requires a separate heating element inside the coffee maker, as compared to the percolator which can be placed on the stovetop. Electrical devices weren’t as safe as they are now, and of course there’s the expense of trying to put a tiny water heater in a coffee maker device.
I have also heard [del]from old people[/del] stories from that era that it was assumed that coffee should taste like shit, so they never knew any better. That may be why the french press didn’t catch on until much later.
They’ve become trendy again amongst my peer group, along with French Presses and these weird teabag things you fill with grounds to make coffee a cup at a time. Don’t underestimate the dedication that Gen Xers put into creating coffee drinks in old and interesting ways.
I had my parent’s old percolator in my college dorm and I LOVED that thing. I would put the water and grounds in the night before, and when I got up, I’d plug it in and it would perk while I showered. I’d walk back down the hall greeted by the smell of my freshly perked coffee. Fantastic!
Of course, I did live in the dorm at it was 1982, so anything above running water was a luxury to me.
Same here. Nostalgic memories aside, percolation makes for poor coffee, and the science supports that. I drank an ocean-full of rotten coffee in the military from those ubiquitous 42-cup percolators.
We had a little aluminum coffee perker that you boiled on the stove (a part of it broke, believe it or not) and it made good coffee. But as I recall, it had no coffee filter and I was leery of drinking coffee full of oils, I think coffee is supposed to be filtered if you drink a lot of it. Also, it had to be watched, you couldn’t walk away from it like you can a drip maker… My mom had a real 1960’s plug-in coffee maker for years (the tall plastic cased thing with daisies or some such decorating it), that finally gave out, and I saw many similar ones in the thrift stores, but none for sale in department stores. Now they expect you to buy a $100 + machine with little coffee pods you set in, and I’m having none of that. I get by perfectly fine with my $20 Mr. Coffee, a bag of filters, and my choice of beans.
Supposedly the aromatic flavor compounds are bubbled out into the air instead of remaining in the coffee where you’ll taste them. So you smell the coffee more all over the house, but the taste is missing. Plus, the higher water temperature causes the coffee to taste boiled instead of brewed.
A Moka forces steam from the container underneath, through packed coffee in the middle, and into a compartment on top. It’s a lot like an espresso maker, just with less pressure.
Before Mr. Coffee, everyone perked coffee. Mr. Coffee (and later filter machines) were quicker, easier to use, and could keep a pot of coffee hot all day.
Perked coffee was a bit tricker to keep from reboiling, and if you kept it on the stove, it would get nasty. They also were difficult to clean, since the grounds stayed in contact with the metal of the percolator basket. They quickly built up oils and, in an office environment, no one washed them properly.
Restaurants didn’t use percolators; the used vacuum coffee makers, which were easier to clean.
Filter coffeemakers did exist before the coffee machines; Melita was the big name for that.
Only if you didn’t use percolator filters. I don’t know anyone who used a percolator at home that didn’t use filters (camping is another story, where it was also common to just boil grounds in a pot of water then strain the coffee out with a pot lid), and they were common at least back to the 1940s (cite: mom). I do think they were used more to keep grounds out of the coffee, but they also were touted as making clean-up a snap.
