Electric Coffee Percolators
Electric Coffee Percolators – The Coffee That Won The West
It’s no secret that Americans are absolutely in love with coffee. It has been a part of our history ever since the first sailing ship from South America docked and delivered bags of beans that would convert a bunch of tea drinking colonists into coffee fanatics. Coffee moved West with the expansion and then further West during the taming of the wild frontier. All of us have a picture in our mind’s eye of a group of cowboys lounging around a fire after a hard day on the trail boiling up some coffee in their tin coffee pot.
Wait a minute. Boiling coffee? Is that how it’s supposed to be made? Almost every American today drinks coffee made by dripping water on the grounds. There are however, a small but growing group of coffee drinkers who want the real thing. They want their coffee strong and hot and they rely on electric coffee percolators to give them just that.
Actually there are a number of manufacturers that still produce electric coffee percolators. While percolated coffee is probably most common in restaurants and catering businesses using the huge 10 gallon models, many homes now sport the retro looking chrome finished steel pots that can quickly perk up to 12 cups of hot coffee in minutes.
What is it about perked coffee that makes it so good? To understand the answer you have to understand how a percolator works. Percolators use a basket to hold the grounds. That basket slides over a hollow stem and then is placed in the pot full of water. As the water boils, it rises up through the stem, is circulated through the grounds and then returns to the bottom of the pot where the whole cycle is repeated.
The difference between perked and drip coffee is that the perked involves much higher water temperatures and the coffee is exposed to the water multiple times, not just once as in a drip machine. The result is the perked coffee extracts the entire flavor from the grounds and is much hotter when served.
Modern electric coffee percolators typically come with features that will let you adjust the perk time which in turn controls the strength of the brew. They almost universally come with detachable cords which allow you to take the pot directly to the table for serving. It is absolutely the best way to sample the flavor that made coffee so popular in this country in the first place.
The only real downside to electric coffee percolators is the clean up. Because the base is an electrical appliance you can’t immerse the pot in water or clean them in a dish washing machine. The basket and stem can ne removed and cleaned in the sink. If you have a bottle brush or a sponge and mall hands you can use those to clean the inside of the pot. It’s a little more work than a drip machine but the coffee it produces is so worth it.
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So if you want to know the taste the cowboys got hooked on, or your parents or grandparents for that matter, you have to get an electric coffee percolator and boil up some authentic joe.