Percolator Love: Or, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
Posted by TheShot on 16 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Home Brew, Machine, Quality Issues, Restaurant Coffee
Having a wife who runs her own private supper club (for which I am the front-of-the-house/”beverage guy”), I’ve been known to occasionally read the goings-on in the food world. This week, my wife introduced me to a post from a renowned food writer, Michael Ruhlman, who recently wrote about the virtues of percolator coffee: ruhlman.com: Percolator Love. It’s the thinking behind posts such as Mr. Ruhlman’s that are contributing to the Philistine state of coffee in American restaurants.
Mr. Ruhlman has made a culinary career out of “writing about food and the work of professional cooking,” including co-authoring The French Laundry Cookbook with Thomas Keller (himself representative of the odd food savant/coffee idiot phenomenon) and authoring The Making of a Chef, a narrative about life in the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). (The CIA thankfully just announced a new coffee program to help dispel coffee quality ignorance among so many budding star chefs.) Combine this with a call this afternoon from Josh Sens, of San Francisco magazine — who asked for clarification on the issues with percolator coffee for his article deadline looming tomorrow — and the subject of percolator coffee seems worth a mention.
Mr. Ruhlman’s post laments the demise of the percolator, a 1940s and 1950s staple which fell out of favor once the prototype Mr. Coffee machine and the ensuing family of filter drip coffee machines rose to prominence in the 1970s. So why was the percolator brushed aside so abruptly? It wasn’t a manufacturing conspiracy — percolators were one of the greatest atrocities modern man ever committed upon good coffee. Coffee is cooking. It’s about using the right temperature, time, and pressure to extract the right flavors from the beans and to leave the nasty stuff behind.
And based on these merits, using a percolator on coffee is akin to baking a cake with a blow dryer. It’s surgery with a shovel. Take ground coffee; scald it with boiling water unevenly sprayed on some exposed grounds and not the rest; guess when the heating element kills itself off; hope for the best; serves 12.
Nostalgia makes some people long for the flavors and smells of their youth, but it also gets Communist Party members re-elected in Russia and sends divorcées back to bad marriages. While most home filter drip coffee machines even today suffer from temperature control problems (their #1 deficiency), they are still largely a step up from our culinary Dark Ages that were characterized by Potato Buds, instant Tang, instant coffee, and percolators.
7 Comments »
on 15 Aug 2008 at 12:57 pm +00:00T 1.Matthew said …
I disagree. I know many coffee snobs, serious coffee connoisseurs, who disagree as well.
But you’re probably right.
on 15 Aug 2008 at 4:19 pm +00:00T 2.TheShot said …
My parents still drink percolator coffee, and I’ll drink it with them when I visit. (Hey, I may love the nuances of coffee consumption, but I can still drink gas station “swill” and enjoy it.)
Percolator coffee is about as subtle as a chainsaw and about as precise as grinding your beans with a claw hammer. Some kinds of coffee work better than others in a percolator — particularly darker roasts and beans with a greater tolerance for variation. And as always, it depends on the flavor profile(s) you individually appreciate more.
Of course my parents still don’t own an answering machine and have rotary phones hardwired to the walls (no jacks), but that’s another story…
on 13 Jun 2011 at 4:29 pm +00:00T 3.Chris said …
As someone who used to be a drip-brew drinker for the past 20 years and recently decided to try a percolator because of Michael’s article, I will never again drink Drip Brew. No nostalgia here… percolators were not used in my home growing up; so much for your theory. Some of us just prefer dark, strong coffee. Is that bad? Geez. It’s called “personal preference” and I am sick of coffee snobs who think that they call the shots and they know better and us regular folk don’t. Greek and Turkish coffee is boiled and sugared but no one seems to make a fuss about that, even though Turkish coffee is served in some speciality restaurants and some rave about it, so are they heretics if they like it so much? The electric percolators I am familiar with don’t even boil the water; they heat it to 200 degrees, the temperature that ‘coffee experts’ agree is within the optimum range for brewing. The water then showers down over the ground coffee, repeatedly, until it has completed the brew cycle.
Many people believe that this washes all the flavor out of the coffee, and causes all the bitter oils to end up in the brew. Well, then why is letting the grinds steep right in the water for 4 minutes, as they do in a French press, any better, yet French Press is all the rage right now?
on 14 Jun 2011 at 12:37 am +00:00T 4.Enrico said …
Because the water+coffee resulted from the first “spray” is used to spray the already-spent ground coffee again, over and over again? And French Press don’t do that?
on 14 Jun 2011 at 2:03 pm +00:00T 5.TheShot said …
@ Chris: Thanks for the great comment. I really like what you wrote. Of course, I would never be mistaken for a card-carrying member of the Fruity Coffee Mafia, which has largely brainwashed any discussions of quality coffee these days. Earthy, body-driven coffees have their value and place. Just that you’d never know it if you visited decent coffeeshops that haven’t been around before 2005.
But one major difference between Greek and Turkish coffee from percolator coffee is the evenness of the boil — as facilitated by the brewing vessel.
If you found a percolator that maintains an even 200-degrees F, you have to be more than lucky. It’s almost impossible to get a decent filter-drip coffee maker made in the 1990s or 2000s that can even pull that off. Which isn’t to say it isn’t possible. Just that with most 1950s percolator technology, the odds are heavily stacked against you.
We went through a period of playing with 50s and 60s percolators the way that coffee industry snobs these days play with different funnel shapes of pour-over brewing cones, with vacuum brewing bulbs, with Chemex pots, etc. We never could get it to work neither consistently nor very right. And here we enjoy the so-out-of-favor flavor profile of an earthy, second-crack roasted Sulawesi coffee (for example).
We’ve always advocated the right tool for the job. Our Cona vacuum pot is amazing on a delicate Kona, but it is wasted on some wilder, dry-processed Ethiopian beans — or even a darker-roasted Esmeralda Geisha — for example. And a great Bolivian CoE coffee in a V60 pour-over tastes lame in a French press. Whereas some body-heavy Sulawesi in a French press shines. I would expect a good operating percolator to best excel with the coffee profiles you favor. But that said, good luck finding one to do the job right.
on 25 Nov 2011 at 10:42 pm +00:00T 6.Tbone said …
Well here we go.
Problem is I like most people love great coffee but do not own great equipment nor do I buy great coffee. It all cost money and I don’t have much. That said I have bought many cups of coffee that were really good but what I make at home is lacking. The other problem is laziness first thing in the morning I just want to get er done.
I had perked coffee when I was young but have never owned a percolator until recently. I have owned many cheap drip machines and have always been discussed with the results. You just should not have to microwave your coffee you just made but I have never owned a drip machine that makes coffee hot enough. The results I get from drip machines is why I quit buying expensive beans and grinding them. For all my trouble if I go to the right establishment I can still buy a better cup of coffee so why bother.
Maybe I’m wrong but you cannot buy a drip machine under $100 that will brew coffee at the optimal temperatures of 195 to 210 degrees.
An earlier post stated that with a percolator you are running coffee over spent grounds but that does not make since. Those grounds are not spent with the first burst of water they are not even all wet yet. A french press steeps the brew for several minutes with continual contact with the water before it is done.
Paper filters do effect the flavor profile.
I bought a percolator because I wanted to make coffee when while camping assuming it would be inferior. That said my percolator is not electric so I have to stay on my game when I use it.
The water does not have to be boiling to perk, I have an infra red thermometer and can verify that. As soon as the water starts to perk I turn the heat to between low and med low which is not hot enough to boil but enough to perk. I let it perk for 8 minutes but it is perking slow, electric percolators perk faster so it must be the temp. I use almost half as much coffee as I do in my drip machine and it comes out stronger and without bitterness. I do not like bitter coffee. I do like it strong and bold.
That said IMOP the percolator makes a much better cup of coffee than a cheap drip machine I realize Kruips makes some $200 plus machines that probably do a much better job of temperature control but I have not tasted the product so I cannot comment.
As far as I am concerned the percolator make a notably better cup of coffee but I am going to more trouble. The quality improvement has caused me to question the auto mindless process of making coffee and I do intent to purchase a french press to see if it is all it is cracked up to be. It looks easy enough.
I’m not a snob I just like coffee the way I like it but my drip machine ain’t gettin the job done. I prefer my perk coffee. Coffee ain’t cheap anymore so it is worth the trouble. I also want to try the AroPress thingy, anybody want to weigh in on that.
From my experience science aside a percolator is an improvement over Mr. Coffee.
on 26 Nov 2011 at 10:39 am +00:00T 7.TheShot said …
No doubt there are a number of old school percolators that can outperform the millions of faulty drip machines out there — Mr. Coffee, Krups, and otherwise. But success there is typically by accident and not by design.
And that last sentence is precisely what Michael Ruhlman failed to recognize. It’s as if Mr. Ruhlman were lamenting the prized, old-fashioned use of conventional radiant (aka “thermal”) ovens for baking pastries or browning meats. As if today’s near-universal recommendation of convection ovens for these tasks were some devious modernist plot, denying us of our mealy-pie-crust and dried-out-Thanksgiving-turkey heritage.