No matter if it’s a home espresso machine, a French press, a $25 “Mr. Coffee” machine from your favorite retailer, chances are you have a coffeemaker in your home.
As did your parents, their parents, their parents’ parents, and so forth, back to the early 1900s, with a real boom in the emergence of electric coffee percolators on seemingly every kitchen counter by mid-century.
But we’re a bit ahead of ourselves. People have been brewing coffee on cookstoves and over fires for centuries, but we want to talk about how the coffeemaker – ubiquitous as it is in home kitchens and company breakrooms the world over – got its start.
Coffeemakers today are mostly “automatic drip”coffeemakers They work – at the most basic level – by placing coffee grounds in filter (often paper, but can be metal) inside a funnel, which is placed over a coffee pot made of glass or ceramic. The person brewing the coffee pours cold water into a separate chamber of the coffeemaker, which is then heated to boiling, which then flows into the funnel, mixing the water with grounds to make the coffee.
We’ve already talked about how coffee was “found,” so there’s no need to write more here, so we’ll move forward a few hundred years from that wonderful discovery and talk about coffee makers.
The first coffee percolator (the precursor to our modern coffeemakers) was created by the Parisian metalsmith Laurens in 1818. English engineer James Napier then created a vacuum siphon coffeemaker in 1853 which siphoned the coffee – once ready – into a globe top by a jug using a vacuum. From there the coffee was poured out via a tap. Most of these coffeemakers got their heat from being placed on a cook stove or over an open fire.
Coffee-making machines really started to turn into the coffeemakers we know today in 1908 when German housewife Melitta Bentz invented the first paper coffee filter so that she wouldn’t have to boil loose coffee grounds, thus helping here to reduce coffee’s bitter taste. She patented her invention and built a company that sold the filters, now known as the Melitta Group KG.
More and more homes had electricity as a main source of power beginning in the early 1900s and the electric percolator – which meant someone wishing to heat and brew coffee didn’t have to do so on a stovetop – grew in popularity, especially as electricity use in the home became safer.
The percolator pretty much went out of vogue with the introduction of the electric drip coffeemaker (what most of us have in our homes) in the early 1970s.
And there you have it: we pretty much can thank those who made electricity safe for use in the home for our being able to plug in a machine, pour some coffee grounds into a filter, some water into that filter, flick a switch, and then wait a few minutes for many of us to enjoy our favorite brand of coffee every morning – or whenever we desire.
Speaking of trying new things, if you haven’t yet tried Ubean Coffee, we urge to see for yourself how great it is. Contact a distributor near you today.