Coffee Percolators: An Explanation and Roast

nostalgia is weird it sometimes makes us do things that don't make any sense now look I'm not immune from it either I still like to make compilations of the music I like on cassette tapes rather than just make a playlist which takes two minutes I'd like to listen to each song as I record it onto the tape get good at pausing the deck at just the right time for small gaps adjust the levels so that it doesn't peak too much and ooh when you get to the end of a side you got to look for a song that's just the right length or maybe go with one that's a little too short and then rewind the tape and rerecord the last four with a bit of a longer gap anyway nostalgia makes us do weird things and it made me buy a percolator but first a word from our sponsor this episode of technology connections has been brought to you by too many small kitchen appliances do you ever decide to make toast and find yourself limited to just that one toaster on your countertop well too many small kitchen appliances has you covered thanks to too many small kitchen appliances you'll have your choice of not just toast but toaster too are you tired of not being able to slow cook seven meals at once with too many small kitchen appliances you'll be slow cooking in style don't delay add a little spice to your life with too many small kitchen appliances today thanks to many small kitchen appliances you know I'm glad they chose to pitch in because I was getting a little bored with my selection of coffee makers every morning I'd like to brew - nice cups of joe and I've grown weary of only having five coffee makers to choose from so I've bumped that up to seven with the addition of these two percolators what is a percolator you ask why what a great question if only there were a piece of long-form Internet content to answer that for you oh right this is a percolator for some reason you can still buy these these stalwarts of coffees past used to be in nearly every home but then we were introduced to the wonders of drip coffee and we decided these are awful at least most of us did and now of course we've been introduced to the wonders of plastic single-use coffee pods because we can't be bothered to put a filter in a basket anymore I guess and for those of us who like to work for our Java there are just so many ways to go about it these days like pour-over french-press cold-brew and whatever other fanciful techniques are making the rounds fun fact coffee gadgets make up 80% of too many small kitchen appliances yearly portfolio we interrupt this program with a public service announcement dear demographic we would like to inform you that fresh and hot are two different concepts believe it or not the freshness of a cup of coffee is largely independent from its hotness those of you who will accept nothing less than burns your tongue fire liquid are ruining it for the rest of us for you see many establishments which subscribe to this hot is fresh philosophy or else cater to those who subscribe use carafes warmed by a hot plate this burns the coffee in short order for those of us who can taste things burned coffee is bad an alternative philosophy is to maximize the time a given quantity of coffee remains palatable some establishments use insulated coffee servers to keep brewed coffee hot as long as possible without introducing more heat and burning the coffee while this may lead to coffee which is slightly less hot I promise it actually tastes much better and as a bonus it reduces waste related protip if you use a drip coffee maker be sure not to start the brew too long before you intend to drink the coffee likewise when brewing is complete be sure to turn the unit off as soon as you can this minimizes the time the hot plate burns the coffee a side effect of this style of coffee maker which your host feels gives them an unfair Leap or reputation after all what is drip coffee but slower automated pour over speaking of pour over how does one actually make coffee aha at last we are back on track well it all starts with the plant with particularly particular preferences regarding where it would like to grow let's just skip over all the in-between thorny things like exploitative labor practices and get to the part where we roast the seeds which we call beans for reasons of this plant we burned them but like not too much with some notable exceptions after this rather heated ordeal and possibly a bit of grinding Arabica Dabra it ends up on store shelves where you buy it because you're addicted to it but of course really you could stop whenever you please it's just it's just so good so why bother my right okay well to turn coffee beans into delicious hot brown we need to make hot water and ground coffee very close friends through some kind of introduction this is you may recognise as a maintenance sir an ordinary coffee maker to use it you simply put a filter into the basket endure the internet comments about how you should be using on bleached filters prompted by this shot add some ground coffee put the thing in the thing the water and the other thing and flip the switch the water in the reservoir is heated and pumped in a very clever fashion I might add - a little drippy thing where it will land on and seep through the coffee grounds and end up in the pot below it now infused with the sweet sweet caffeine that was in the beans and flavours and other things probably - before we were introduced to the wonders of mr. coffee we had to deal with these things now don't get me wrong the invention of the coffee percolator was itself a pretty neat thing as it presented a fairly good balance between convenience and quality there had been other ways to get your hot brown before but some were really finicky others couldn't make larger quantities of coffee so for a time here in the u.s. we settled on these as fairly good catch-all solutions I have here two kinds of percolators a stovetop version and an electric version they both operate using the same exact principle but the electric one has a distinct advantage which we'll see shortly however the glass one illustrates how they work much better because it's glass and we can see through it percolators use the fact that boiling water creates bubbles to force water up a tube percolators have three basic parts a vessel for holding water to be heated a vertical tube sometimes called the perk tube but that's actually a misnomer and the tube travels through a basket which holds ground coffee above the water level on the stovetop percolator you'll find that the base of the tube has a sort of upside-down funnel thing when it's assembled this funnel covers much of the bottom surface the purpose of that is to catch bubbles that form as the water boils see when you filled a percolator with water and place the tube and basket inside water will travel up the tube to the same level as the water in the pot as the water is heated and approaches boiling point bubbles of water vapor form on the bottom many of these bubbles simply float to the surface but some of them get caught by our little funnel thing this forces them to travel up the tube and as they bunch together they force the water sitting in the tube to travel upwards as well it then splashes against the inside of this glass knob thing which allows you to see that the pumping action is occurring and falls onto the spreader place below it after the spreader plates spreads it out this very hot water now falls onto the grounds below it and seeps through them which by the way is where the name percolator comes from percolating just means filtering liquid through porous materials really all coffee makers are percolators because percolating is how you make coffee excluding of course things like a French press which use infusion but that's not important right now but probably thanks to the lovely sounds these make as water splashes to the top we have confused things a bit in the States at least and sometimes refer to this water splashy action itself as percolation that's probably how these tubes got called the perk tube and anyway I'm spending way too much time on this so let's continue as the water percolates through the coffee it picks up that caffeine and flavors and colors I guess and then it ends up right back where it started this here is the fatal flaw of the percolator 4 you see there is no separation between the fresh water and the brewed coffee it's just one big happy family this of course means that the coffee's concentration continually increases as the coffee is percolating you eventually start running brewed coffee through the grounds again and then again and that's generally not a recipe for good coffee some people like the fact that the coffee recirculates as it does we call these people masochists to be fair though you can control how strong the coffee becomes using time just let it percolate for however long you like then remove the heat and serve this was after all how everybody did it before our savior mr. coffee appeared but designs like this glass one have one more flaw up their sleeve they don't start moving water up the tube until the water is boiling and quite roaring Li I might add remember how I was saying in that PSA earlier that adding heat to brewed coffee will burn it well this percolator burns the coffee well it brews hey at least it kills two birds with one stone this electric one works in a much more elegant fashion its water conveyance tube doesn't have a funnel thing at the bottom and that's because it heats the water in a very small spot look in the bottom and you'll see that the tube fits snugly into this little recess this is the only part that actually gets hot so when you plug it in it starts percolating almost immediately effectively the tube traps small quantities of water in the heat chamber which causes it to boil rapidly and so the bubbles form shoot some of it up this tube where it will then percolate through the grounds and this basket that water then gets replaced by the colder water surrounding the heat chamber this does still have the recirculation flaw of the stovetop percolator but it means that it's not constantly burning the coffee most of the water gets heated from the water that falls through the basket and back into the pot and this allows the device to have an automatic stop function as it percolates the bulk of water slowly gets warmer and once it gets near boiling point a thermostat cuts in and switches the device into a warming mode and this mode it no longer gets hot enough to continue pumping water to the top so the brewing action stops and for the icing on the cake a little neon indicator will light up to let you know that it's done so what my impression on how well these make coffee let's do a taste test shall we I'm going to be using my everyday coffee so I'll get a great sense of how badly these Butcher it I've ground the coffee rather coarsely as you ideally should when using a percolator this is incidentally another reason why these one out of favor as coffee man facture stopped selling pre-ground percolator grind coffee anyway let's cut to an unscripted segment hi welcome to an unscripted segment so you may notice that one of the percolators is not here and that's because while I tried to make it work with the little hot plate that I've used in other videos that does not produce enough heat to make it perfectly so it needs to be on an honest-to-goodness stove so that will be happening upstairs and I will bring it back down here when it is ready but first I'm going to start this and show you how to do it as I said in the scripted segment I am using my everyday coffee what is my everyday coffee you ask I'm not gonna tell you because everybody judges everybody for that kind of thing but I will tell you it is not from Starbucks and it is Fairtrade that's all you need to know I am definitely not a coffee snob and I refuse to let myself become a coffee snob but I am pedantic enough that I measure my coffee out every morning by weight and I have put the exact same amount of weight that I always do with a drip coffee maker inside this coffee thing basket and the same exact amount of water that I would normally use to make this quantity of coffee is in the percolator the only difference here is this is a percolator and this was ground more coarsely so that it would work better with a percolator because this does not have a filter in it I could put a filter in it but I did not and I will not be judging grounds that get in the water because I expect that to happen both on this one and a stove top model but for this coffeemaker you start by filling it with water which we already did you put the park tube into the bottom and fit it in that little recess slide this over it cool now this is the spreader for this one that goes on top and then this whole thing gets shoved down with the lid is that difficult no but I find it to be way more finicky than a regular old coffee maker this has an old-school kitchen appliance plug so I will plug it in and you will notice that this starts making noise quite quickly it's already making making noises and it's only been this long and now it is percolating so I'm now going to go upstairs and start the other one you guys keep watch of this I just got back from upstairs because the one on the stove just started percolating and this is already done so again the stovetop models I don't know why anyone would use them anyway I have set a timer for five minutes that's how long I'm going to let that percolate I just wanted to say that the one thing I'm not quite sure of but it looks to be okay is some experimenting I was doing earlier indicated that the glass one needs to have a fair bit of water in it in order for it to percolate if you only have enough water to say fill a mug like this it doesn't really percolate at all so the amount that I have in there it seems to be percolating pretty well but if it is noticeably weaker than this I will assume that it just needs more water but I'm not wasting any more of my good coffee on this experiment anyway I'll be back in a bit I'm back and I brought this now this is not particularly dark but the coffee that I use doesn't make a very dark coffee anyway so I'm not necessarily concerned about that I have two mugs with some cream and sugar in there yes I take my coffee with cream and sugar because I love myself and yes this one was in keep warm for five or six minutes but I don't think it will matter much this is about the darkness that I would expect out of my out of my drip coffeemaker it's a little lighter but not much it's also poor is really weirdly out of this I'm sure it's bunching up against the grounds I tried to put the same amount of cream in here and it is a very similar color so hey we did a we at least got that kind of right in there I think this is a tad lighter but not much okay so time to come clean I used this once before and it wasn't awful but it smelled horrible same exact thing the smell it just smells not pleasant you know like I like the smell the fresh cup of coffee this is not that this is very pungent like there's a sharpness to it and and also like a chemical smell and I don't like it oh this one which definitely has more grounds in it for what it's worth oddly enough this one has less of a smell it's still not good it's not oh no that chemical that that weird like pungent smell is there so these both smell really bad yeah like if you're if you're someone who likes the smell of coffee and this is what you're used to oh you've not smelled good coffee I'm kind of afraid to taste these plus they are probably quite hot this one was boiling just a moment ago this one's probably not like that hot I'll start I'll start with this one it's not i if i were served this at a restaurant I would consider it bad coffee but I wouldn't not drink it so it's not so bad that I would send it back but this is not this is not the coffee that I have for breakfast with breakfast ah no no um that tastes so bad there's a it's like worse than vending machine coffee at least I think so this is not there's nothing it it is coffee but it doesn't have any of the pleasant aspects of coffee shall we shall we try this one I'm a little afraid oh this is worse see this one actually doesn't this one doesn't taste burned to me surprisingly enough this one does this tastes like coffee that's been you know left in the coffee pot for two hours and it's I just made it yeah that's got is a different kind of burden from what I'm used to but it's there cuz normally I describe the taste of burnt coffee it's almost almost a caramel e4 caramely obviously it's not pleasant like that but it's almost like a carmelization is what I get them in that this one is so much better like if you're gonna use a percolator don't not on the stove get get an electric one and I should say I don't know if all electric ones are created equal but I'm assuming that since this is still available for purchase this is the design that is you know lect the one that's been refined to that see it's so funny because now this tastes pretty good in comparison to this this is much better this is and to know that it did this to coffee I like makes me wonder if I had you know just like it's a random coffee put it in there what I even tolerated it all I could not tell you since I don't know if you can see this at all I will take a picture of the tops is just so you can see that the the darkness is pretty is pretty similar between the two but yeah this neither of these make what I would consider good coffee this makes okay coffee but I still would not take this over drip coffee ever if I had no other option but this I would definitely take it over this especially cuz it was faster I'm surprised how long it took this to even start percolating this um I mean it didn't start until this had finished so this is definitely faster I mean this is kind of charming I'll give it that that's it though the actual finished product gross gross gross do not use a perkily I mean like really I just uh I just have to ask the people who say they like this have you had coffee that's been in a drip machine or any anything better lots of people consider drip to be bad I disagree with them I think it as I said earlier I think it has to do with when people allow it to get burned I think coffee fresh from a drip machine is perfectly fine pretty good even but if this is your idea of what good coffee is we are at an impasse because I can't agree with you but anyway shall we get back to the scripted part I think we should get back to the scripted part so there you have it percolators why are they still made well i suppose these ones are good for camping or other places where you have fire but not electricity but as far as electric ones i have no idea it's got to be purely nostalgia at this point or else fears of plastic components maybe i did read that in some reviews whatever the reason I would not recommend purchasing one I mean they're not even easy to use it's much more finicky than just a drip machine and it's a huge hassle in general I just don't see the appeal of these at all now in fairness its coffee is nowhere near as bad as this guy's coffee so I could probably get used to it eventually still though it is much much worse than my plain old drip machine then again I'm just a youngster who's only known drip coffee and the supposedly better options everyone tells me I need to embrace and just as this coffee tastes weird and wrong to me I suppose there are people out there to whom this style of coffee is just right I mean it's smelly dirt water to my tastes but different strokes and all that well thanks for watching I hope you liked this silly little video it turns out that I bought these percolators almost a year ago now I bought them for making a video certainly not to make coffee and I kind of forgot about them this glass one was a vintage thing from eBay but the electric one came right from the Amazon and there are a startling number of options on there including glass stovetop models reading the reviews makes me question my sanity quite a bit then again like I said some people like different things can't account for taste [Music] a little too short and then rewind the shoot my loud chair strikes again then we were introduced to the wondrous boy this was supposed to take effect this was supposed to be quick it is not quick you see many establishments but soon establishment establishments which oh that's a tongue twister and for those of you who like to work for our Java those of us who that would explain why that sentence felt broken expressive cold brew and whatever other fanciful techniques we are that are forking the 14th forged it ends up on store shelves where you buy it because shoot I need a coffee mug how does one actually make coffee ahahahahahaha the water in the pot as the water heated in a whoops now I've grounded the coffee grounded you're grounded [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Technology Connections

Views: 1,672,638

Rating: 4.8697071 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: E9avjD9ugXc

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TechConnectify]

Get ready for the controversy!

[u/SherlockShackleton]

/u/TechConnectify Great video, loved the ad segment. Wish you'd do a follow up on espresso and the ingenious design of the moka pot, as it's almost a complete reversal on the percolation seen with the "percolators".

[u/mitchb]

I will now use the term "Hot Brown" at all times.

[u/karmabaiter]

Have you tried a moka pot? It works on the same principle as a percolator, but doesn't burn the coffee.

[u/aoeudhtns]

Great video. I have to agree that percolators are almost always not as good as drip. But I think we should consider a few things:

First, to answer your question about popularity, because they can be both large and fast they are great for entertaining. Many a church has a gigantic electric urn for making ungodly amounts of mediocre coffee and keeping it ready. We even use 12 cup percolators when hosting the holidays, so we can offer fresh both caf & decaf without too much fuss. I'd rather have the electric percolator than drip that's been on the burner when either has been in keep warm for some time.

I would wager that coffee/water ratios need to change to optimize for percs. Also due to hotter brew temps roasts on the lighter side would probably work better. Or is that darker roasts? I always mix those up.

But I think the most interesting thing to acknowledge is that back in the day, coffee had a lot more robusta and less arabica. It would be interesting to test a more "old school" blend and roast with the percolator.

[u/[deleted]]

This video was absolutely brilliant! I like all of the Technology Connections but this one was inspired! Couldn't help but to notice the conspicuous absence of the venerable Moka Pot, though...

[u/ecniv_o]

How has nobody pointed out the closed captioning? If you haven't, I'd recommend rewatching with captions on. Worth it.

[u/Fishman23]

You were right about percolator coffee being bad. I grew up with my dad using it until I was about 17 then we got a drip coffee maker. Night and day difference even not using premium grounds.

Then I joined the US Navy and had to contend with their coffee. 🤮

[u/rickane58]

For anyone who hasn't seen it after Alec casually mentioned the super interesting way drip coffee machines work, here's The Engineer Guy explaining how they work with no moving parts.