Episode Details

For much of the 20th century the perk and gurgle of a percolator was the sound of the American morning. Inside, water in the bottom chamber boils and steam bubbles channeled up a central tube act like a gas lift pump, throwing hot water against the lid and down through a perforated basket of coarse grounds. The brewed liquid falls back into the reservoir and is pumped through again and again, so the pot keeps extracting past the acids and sugars into bitter tannins unless it comes off the heat when the slow perking turns into a steady gurgle.

Parisian tinsmith Joseph Henri Marie Laurens built a version with a rising tube in 1819, and James Nason of Massachusetts received the first US percolator patent in 1865 for a different mechanism. The modern design came from Illinois farmer Hanson Goodrich in 1889: a boiling base, a central tube, and a hanging basket that could turn an ordinary pot into a percolator. General Electric was publishing Coffee Making by Electricity by 1905, and automatic models of the 1940s lowered the heat on their own. Then, in the early 1970s, home electric drip machines and improved freeze dried instant coffee ended its reign within a few years.

• In 1970 donut shaped paper filter rings held premeasured coffee and slid over the tube; General Foods' Max Pax was discontinued by 1976.
• Germany's Neue Aromatur used double layered, cross slit porcelain filters instead of paper.
• Siphon brewers from the early 1830s pull coffee down through a cooling vacuum once, so they are not percolators.
• Melitta Bentz's 1908 drip method is a single gravity pass through the grounds.
• Alfonso Bialetti's 1933 moka pot uses sealed vapor pressure and never recycles coffee, yet North Americans often call it a percolator.