Pros and Cons of an Old-Fashioned Cup of Coffee

In the past, I’ve reviewed Jenna Woginrich’s book, Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life on Self Reliance Works. When I read the book, I was struck by her advocacy for percolated coffee. She flatly states that coffee made in a glass-topped percolating pot is the best you can have.

My preferred coffee maker is an Italian style stovetop espresso maker. This is, actually, a percolator too. However, I’m of an age when I can remember grandparents and older friends making coffee in a percolating pot. And, as it so happens, we have one of those pots on our sailboat. It seemed only fair to try percolating a pot of coffee the old-fashioned way.

I retrieved the pot from the boat, and grabbed our 1944 edition Good Housekeeping Cook Book off the shelf to read how to make coffee in a percolator. Unfortunately, I’m the only member of the family who drinks coffee, so I had to answer the question of how much to make. I settled on “4 cups,” which I put in quotes because percolating, like all methods of making coffee, makes a quantity of coffee that seems to bear little or no relation to the amount of water used.

I followed the recipe, though, and used 2 tablespoons of coffee for each cup of water. That’s a lot of coffee! Since I grind my beans myself, I suspect I could probably use less next time. At any rate, I ended up with 1 1/2 cups of coffee, a cup in my case being about 14 ounces.

It was good! It’s hard to say without thorough, side-by-side taste testing, but it seemed as good as I get from my espresso maker. The aesthetics of sight, sound and smell of a perking pot provided added benefit.

However, the math doesn’t add up economically: 4 times the grounds for ½ again as much coffee as I get with the espresso maker does not qualify this as sustainable coffee making. The percolator went back to the boat, I’m afraid. It was a fun experiment, but I’ll stick to my espresso maker.

A version of this post appeared previously on the Zeiger Family Homestead Blog.

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Mark Zeiger is a regular contributor to Self Reliance Works. He and his family homestead off the grid in Southeast Alaska. Learn more about their life through their photos and newly redesigned blog at www.akzeigers.com.