Why doesn’t anyone make a coffee pot under $20 that lasts for more than a few months? No matter what brand I purchase, they still only last until their warranty’s defunct. These manufacturers know their stuff, that’s for sure. They can set the life of a commodity right down to hours and minutes. Of course I could go out and buy a more expensive model, but what if it died just as quickly?
I disassembled each of my last three coffee makers in an attempt to get more life out of them. In each case I discovered the malfunction had nothing to do with an electrical disconnection or clogged tubes. They had simply been built with cheapo electric elements that didn’t last.
Now I’m putting to rest my newest one, in the picture above. It lasted two months and it wasn’t created disassemble-friendly. A sledgehammer convinced it to cooperate. Again it was simply that the electric element (the one that sends the water up the tube) had grown feeble. The actual hot plate part of it still worked ... and it was with that I began my experiments, or should I call it a creation?
I placed the coffee pot on the warmer (the only portion the sledge left intact), and filled the paper-lined plastic filter basket with grounds enough for 12 cups of coffee. I boiled 12 cups of water on the range and poured in slowly over the grounds. Half an hour later I was still trying to get the coffee to run through to the pot below. The grounds must have turned to glue because they wouldn’t let the water pass. The basket was about to overflow, the pot below was only half full, and no liquid was dripping.
Starting over again with only half the amount of coffee and boiling water, I ran into the same problem. I burnt my fingers and spilled coffee and grounds all over the counter trying to close the top of the paper filter and squeeze the liquid out.
At that point I resorted to one of my ancient cookbooks, 1931, to learn what I could about preparing coffee the old fashioned way – by boiling it. It traitorously informed me right away that boiled coffee wasn’t any good and that drip coffee was the best. And all the time I’d thought my new method was drip—only it had just stopped dripping. I guess that made it boiled coffee or possibly squeezed coffee.
I gathered all my loose pieces and tried again, only this time I found a metal container that would hold six cups of water and punched tiny holes in the bottom to allow dripping. With the glass coffee pot sitting on the heating pad, topped by a lined filter basket of coffee grounds, topped by a now-leaky can of six cups of fresh boiled water I watched my experiment take place.
In five minutes the coffee was ready—excellent, smooth coffee! Maybe I should see about a patent???
