Good to the Last Drop
by Bob Brooke

Coffee has been energizing people since dawn of the first millenium of the Christian Era (CE) when they first roasted and ground Arabica beans. Historians believe that an Arabic word, qah’wa, inspired the term “coffee,” a wine made from coffee beans. When people first began drinking coffee, they had to first soften the beans for roasting, boil a kettle full of water for about a minute with the coarse ground coffee beans.

For centuries, coffee grew in ancient forests on Ethiopia’s plateau. According to legend, a goat herder named Kaldi first discovered the beans’ potential there. The Turks first began brewing coffee in 575 CE in hot water in an ibriq, a high and narrow copper poacher with a long handle. From then on, people brewed coffee in a variety of vessels..

One of the most unusual was the balance siphon, which looked a lot like a scale. As the water infused from one side of the mechanism to the other, a snuffer would cover the flame, turning off the heat, allowing the water to cool and return to the original chamber.

Early Coffee Pots
The earliest known coffee pot, a primitive version of the French press, was invented in the 15th century in Arabia. People used this pot, made of a heavy metal and had a long spout, to make a strong, thick brew which they served in small cups. In the 17th century, someone added a lid to keep the heat in, and in the 18th century, someone else added a handle for easier pouring.

The first coffee pot was made in the 17th century in France, although coffee had been around for centuries prior to this. The pot was made of brass and was heated by a flame. Over time, these pots were made from other materials such as silver and porcelain.

In 1672, an Armenian named Pascal used a silver coffee pot to brew coffee in a tent at the St. Germain Spring Fair in Paris. To increase sales, Pascal sent out his Turkish waiter boys throughout the streets of Paris, merrily yelling “Café! Café!” With pitcher and cups in hand, they poured and sold the steaming beverage door-to-door.

Soon English and American silversmiths began to create some beautiful forms for coffee pots. As the 18th century dawned, the consumption of coffee resulted in the mass manufacture of coffee pots. There are some magnificent examples from this period: from plain cylindrical forms to pear shaped deeply fluted bodies and elegant flat chased ornamentation.

Form Follow Function
Soon after this, coffee pots began to be crafted in a tapered cylinder shape with a high domed cover. Makers placed the spout low on the body, along with the classic right-angled handle. Octagonal designs appeared around 1710. This style encompassed a flatter wider base, along with a top in the tear-shaped drop form.

At the same time, coffee brewing took a step ahead as the popularity and demand for coffee grew, so did the need for specialized vessels specially designed for the brewing of coffee, featuring an attached lid to help the infusion process. The pots also had a tapered cylinder shape with a high domed cover. The bottom of the pots became wider than the top, with spouts relocated to the side, in order to help catch the sinking coffee grounds. Another reason for the necessity of coffee pots was so that coffee could be consumed at home.

Coffee pot makers didn’t place the spout on the opposite side of the handle on pots until the 1720s. The incurved base of the coffee pot became standard in the 1730s along with the plain tapered form. The pear-shaped coffee pot came into fashion around the 1740s and prevailed until the 1760s. These jugs tended to have shorter spouts.

Coffee Pot Styles Change Again
During the Rococo or late Baroque Era, the style of coffee pots changed again, becoming larger and more impressive, in a more ornate style. Festoons became a prominent ornament.

By the 1780s, people began adding filters to coffee pots in the form of a cloth or sock placed over the mouth. They placed ground coffee in the sock, then poured hot water over them.

In the late 18th Century some beautiful examples were crafted by the likes of Paul De Lamerie; they featured classic rococo ornamentation which consisted of flowing, asymmetric details and natural motifs including shells (which would often be the chosen shape for a finial). This renowned London silversmith was well known for his craftsmanship in producing fine and collectable coffee pots.

Pear-shaped coffee pots made their way into fashion around the turn of the century, but they didn’t last long. During the Rococo era, coffee pot style once again evolved. Paul DeLaMotte created some truly beautiful examples during the late 18th century. In the 1780s, people used a sock to form a coffee filter, into which they placed the ground coffee, through which they then poured hot water. But the practice was expensive because the cloth filters were so inefficient.

The Introduction of the Drip Pot
Jean Baptiste de Belloy, the Archbishop of Paris invented the first drip coffee pot in 1800. Made of tin, porcelain, and silver, it lasted for several years. His revolutionary device had two parts: an upper container that held ground coffee and an empty lower container that had a cloth filter between it and the top. In this simple yet effective setup, he revolutionized the way people brewed coffee.

Mr. Biggin Coffee Pots was the first company to introduce a coffee pot, called the Mr. Biggin, with a place for the filter and these pots received instant popularity. Unfortunately, the taste of the cloth filter often became undesirably transferred to the coffee, itself. Historians regard the Mr. Biggin as the world’s first commercial coffee maker that came into common use in England around 1817. It was usually an earthenware pot. At first it had in its upper part a metal strainer like the French drip pots. Later models had a flannel or muslin bag suspended from the rim to hold the ground coffee through which the user poured boiling water. This acted as a filter. People called any coffee pot with such a bag fitted into its mouth a coffee biggin. Even later, the coffee biggin evolved into a metal pot with a wire strainer substituted for the cloth bag.

The cuccuma—also known as the cuccumela or the Neapolitan flip coffee pot—used a traditional Italian coffee brewing method. It has long been a staple for many Italian home coffee brewers. The cuccuma was a reinvention of the stovetop pot created during the early 19th century in France by Archbishop Jean Baptiste de Belloy. It was first made of tin; but later, of porcelain and silvert.

Percolators Come on the Scene
By 1818, espresso machines and coffee percolators had been introduced. In 1822, Louis Bernard Rabaut developed a brewing machine that used steam to force hot water through the coffee grounds, creating the first early version of espresso. But it was
Italian Luigi Bezzera who patented the first commercial “espresso” machine—the Tipo Gigante—a large steam driven machine that used a water and steam combination, forced under high pressure to brew the coffee rapidly. It was his invention that became known as the “espresso” machine.

Prior to the beginning of the 20th century, the enamelware, aluminum, or tin pot used for boiling water and brewing coffee in many working class homes was usually one and the same. After setting the pot on a stove and bringing the water inside it to a boil, ground coffee would simply be measured into the pot, where the grounds would swell and mostly sink to the bottom, producing a gritty, unfiltered brew.

The late 19th century witnessed the invention of the percolator which solved the problem of gritty coffee. Designers created the first ones for stove tops. The percolator’s chief advantage was that it had a filter to separate the brewed coffee from the soggy grounds. While manufacturers made most early stovetop percolators out of aluminum and other inexpensive metals, they produced some of copper.

Amalia Melitta Bentz, a housewife from Dresden, Germany, invented the first drip coffee maker in 1908. She discovered that percolators tended to over-brewi the coffee, espresso-type machines tended to leave grounds in the drink, and linen bag filters were exhausting to clean. She experimented with many means but made a two-part filtration system using blotting paper from her son Willy's school exercise book and a brass pot punctured using a nail. The result was a cheap, disposable, and easy-to-clean coffee filter that produced tastier coffee.

Espresso Pots
The moka pot was a stove-top variation of the percolator that brewed coffee by passing boiling water pressurized by steam through ground coffee first and then into a separate holding tank. Named after the Yemeni city of Mocha, it was invented by Alfonso Bialetti in 1933. It quickly became one of the staples of Italian culture. Moka pots were typically made of aluminum, but stainless steel or other alloys could also have been used. Some designs feature an upper half made of heat-resistant glass. Instead of forcing water up through a tube and then over the grounds as in a percolator, a moka pot forced water through the grounds first and then into a separate holding tank.

In Turin, in 1933, Alfonso Bialetti invented the first moka pot by observing the lisciveuse, a steam pot utilized at that time for laundry. In 1946 his son Renato started industrial production, selling millions of moka pots in one year, versus only 70000 sold by his father in the previous 10, making the coffee maker (as well as coffee) an icon of Italy in the world. Naples, albeit being known today as the city of coffee, has seen it later, probably through the ships coming in the ports of Sicily and Naples itself.

People used many coffee pots just for serving, in the same way that they used teapots. Some early 20th-century coffee pots had a thermos built right into the pot. Others, like the Fiesta ware pots from the late 1930s through the early 1940s kept coffee warm only as long as the insulating properties of ceramics would permit.

Other coffee pots, such as those made by Wagner Ware and Chemex utilized the Biggin method of brewing coffee, essentially the drip method most current electric coffee makers use today. Wagner pots from the 1930s were of brushed aluminum, with aluminum filters and Bakelite handles. Chemex pots, invented in the 1940s, had a single, hourglass-shaped piece of crystal-clear blown glass and featured a wooden handle around the pot’s waist and a round filter that fit perfectly into the top part of the hourglass when folded in quarters.

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