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 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 gotta 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 re-record the last 4 with a bit of a longer gap in…
Anyway, nostalgia makes us do weird things.
And it made me buy a percolator!
But first, a word from our sponsor!
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Ya 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 like to brew two 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 coffee’s 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 Appliance’s
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 pro-tip! 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 unfairly poor 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 a plant with particularly particular preferences regarding
where it would like to grow.
Let’s just skip over all of 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 burn them, but like, not too much
(with some notable exceptions).
After this rather heated ordeal and possibly a bit of grinding,
Arabicadabra!
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...
why... why bother amirite?
[slurps obnoxiously loudly]
OK, 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 as you may recognize is a maintenance serv…
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 unbleached filters prompted by this shot,
add some ground coffee,
put the thing in the thing,
the water in the other thing,
and flip the switch.
The water in the reservoir is heated and pumped (in a very clever fashion I might add)
to 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 flavors and other things probably, too.
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 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 US we settled on these as fairly good catch-all solutions.
I have here two kinds of percolators.
A stove-top 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 a stove top 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 fill the 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 plate below it.
After the spreader plate 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’ve 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.
For 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 sleeves!
They don’t start moving water up the tube until the water is boiling.
And quite roaringly, 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 while it brews!
Hey, at least it kills two birds with one stone!
This electric one works in a much more elegant fashion.
[metallic clanging as the things are removed from the thing]
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 formed shoot some of it up this tube
where it will then percolate through the grounds.
In this basket.
That water then gets replaced by the colder water surrounding the heat chamber.
This does still have the recirculation flaw of the stove-top 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.
In 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, want 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 went out of favor,
as coffee manufacturers stopped selling pre-ground percolator grind coffee.
Anyway, let’s cut to an unscripted segment!
[ jazz piano plays softly ] 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 percolate 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, uh,
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 ya because everybody judges everybody for that kinda of thing but
I will tell you it is NOT from Starbucks and it is Fair Trade.
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 thingy.
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 ‘cause this does
not have a filter in it. I could put a filter in it, but I did not.
♫ slow, rompy piano ♫
And, I will not be judging grounds that get in the water because I expect that to happen
both on this one and the stovetop model.
But, for this coffee maker,
you start by filling it with water which I already did.
You put the perk tube
[a perfect little water bloop noise just happened]
into the bottom and fit it in that little recess.
Slide this over it…
[slidey noises]
Cool.
Now this is the spreader for this one,
that goes on top.
And then this whole thing gets shoved down with the lid.
[more metallica]
[THUD]
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.
[pluggy sounds]
And you will notice that this starts making noise quite quickly.
It’s already making… making noises and
it’s only been this long
♫ suspenseful music ♫
And now it is percolating.
So, I’m now gonna go upstairs and start the other one.
You guys, uh…
keep watch of this.
[ pew, pew pew pew, pew pew ]
(it does sound weirdly like a laser blaster when sped up)
Fascinating, innit?
[now it sounds like a steam train]
[I think I can, I think I can I think Ican ithinkican]
[ithinkicanithinkicanithnkcaithcith]
Oh god, IT’S GONNA BLOW!
[sound returns to normal as video resumes normal time]
[click as the light turns on]
[A throbbing gurgle/boiling sound slows and gradually stops]
There were also beeps coming from upstairs - that was me setting a timer for the other percolator
I just got back from upstairs because the one on the stove JUST started percolating
and this is already done.
So, uh, 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.
Umm...
I just wanted to say that the one thing I’m not quite sure of but it looks to be OK 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.
Um, so the amount that I have in there seems to be percolating pretty well… um,
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, uh, 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.
♫ a rhythmic jazzy riff starts to play ♫
This is about the darkness that I would expect out of my, uh, out of my drip coffee maker.
[some lovely pouring noises]
Ehh, it’s a little lighter but not much.
[man this is good Foley]
This also pours really weirdly out of this.
And I’m sure it’s bunching up against the [clears throat] the grounds.
I tried to put the same amount of cream in here and it is a very similar color.
So, hey!
We did uh… we at least got that kinda right didn’t we?
I think this is a... is a tad lighter, but not much.
OK.
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 of a fresh cup of coffee.
This is NOT. THAT.
This is very pungent,
like there’s a sharpness to it and, uh,
and also like a chemical smell?
And I don’t like it.
At all!
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… it’s not…
Oh no, that chemical, that... that weird, like,
pungent smell is there so these both smell really bad.
[laughs]
Like if you’re… if you’re someone who likes the smell of coffee and this is what you’re used to…
ugh!
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 quite that hot.
And I’ll start… I’ll start with this one.
[grumble]
It’s not the..
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.
[lip smacking]
Uh. No.
No. Ugh!
It tastes so bad! There’s a…
it’s like worse than vending machine coffee.
At least I think so.
It is not… there’s nothing… it, 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.
[slurpy slurp]
Oh this is worse.
See, this one actually doesn't
[clears throat]
this one doesn’t taste burned to me.
Surprisingly enough. This one does. This tastes like coffee that’s been,
ya know, left in the coffee pot for two hours.
And it’s…
I JUST made it.
Yeah. It’s got…
It’s a different kind of burn from what I’m used to but it’s there.
‘Cause normally I describe the taste of burnt coffe as almost a, almost a carameley
(or care-a-meley) um,
obviously it’s not pleasant like that but I think it’s almost
like a caramelization is what I get from it.
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, ya know, left. The one that’s been refined to that.
See, it’s so funny ‘cause now this tastes pretty good
[laughs]
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, ya know,
just like... had some random coffee and put it in there would I
even tolerate it at all.
I…
mmhmm…
could not tell ya.
Since I don’t know if you can see this at all I will take a picture of the tops.
This is just so you can see that the, uh, darkness is pretty… is pretty similar between the two.
But, uh, 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 because 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 kinda charming! I’ll give it that.
That’s it, though.
The actual finished product… gross!
Gross.
Do not use a percolator… I mean like…
really? I just… ugh.
I just have to ask the people who say they like this… have you had coffee that’s
been in a drip machine or 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, I dun… ehmmm.
We are at an impasse ‘cause 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 gotta 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 ‘ol drip machine.
Then again, I’m just a youngster whose 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… I kinda forgot about them.
Uh, 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.
♫ scaldingly smooth jazz ♫
A little too short and (chair creaks) and then rewind… shoot.
My loud chair strikes again!
Then we were introduced to the wonders
(crashing noise)
(laughs)
Boy this was supposed to take… this was supposed to be quick. It is not quick!
...you see, many establissments whits..
Establissment…
establishments which! Oh, that’s a tongue twister.
And those of you who like to work for our java
[stares confusedly]
Those of us.
Hoooh,
that would explain why that sentence felt broken
...ench press, cold brew, and whatever other fanciful techniques we are mmm...that are…
fffforking the forking fork.
It ends up on store shelves where you buy it! Bec…
oh shoot I need a coffee mug.
How does one actually make coffee? Ah ha ha!
Ah ha ha ha ha!
(ehhh, what the was that?)
...the water in the pot. As the water heated and appro… oops
Now, I’ve grounded the coffee. Grounded?
You’re grounded!
OH I'M SO CAFFEINATED RIGHT NOW
Let me tell you a story real quick, you see when I was about to make this video there was a knock at the door
but it turns out that was actually just in my imagination! I went to the door and nobody was there.
Startled, I thought to myself "is this a side-effect of all that coffee I've been having?"
but then the Coffee Fairy showed up to reassure me that no, I am totally fine, so on about my business I went.
Really, I'm quite happy to have the Coffee Fairy always there for me when I need him or her or they not really sure on the gender there.
So anyway, I went to go start recording the video after the Coffee Fairy had showed up and everything was going super smoothly! Except is wasn't at all, it was really quite a mess, lots of things were going poorly.
Like for example the lights were all buzzy and flickery but really they weren't it was just something wrong with my vision, again I thought maybe I was having too much coffee but I thought back to what the Coffee fairy had said and they reassured me I was A-OK so I just kept on going
But then my memory card was full so I needed to re-format it but what if there was stuff I needed on there ya know? Like, maybe I didn't actually finish my last video, maybe it's in some weird vide purgatory, I don't know these things, so I needed to check real quick that I had finished the video and it turns out I had!
So I went ahead and reformatted the card, but that angered the lawn mower and so then I had to deal with that guy. He's really quite an ordeal. Pretty sharp but way too fast for my tastes one of these days he's really gonna damage somebody.
Anyway, I hope this gag doesn't flag some sort of captions spam 'cause like I did it but anyway byeeeeeeeeeeeee-
HOT BROWN