Home › Beverages › Coffee Made with Boiling Water
Coffee Made with Boiling Water
Into the inner part of a French coffee pot put the required quantity of ground coffee. Pour over this the necessary quantity of water and allow to stand for five minutes where it will keep hot but not boil.
This is a drip method, not an infusion by boiling, and the whole point is in the last clause: the water must stay hot without ever returning to a boil. The original gives no quantities at all, so the ratios below are the modern standard.
- The "French coffee pot"In 1911 this meant a two-chambered drip pot — sometimes called a biggin — with a perforated upper basket that holds the grounds above the serving pot. It is not a French press and not a percolator. A modern pour-over cone set over a warmed carafe behaves the same way.
- Never let it boilBoiling coffee after brewing drives off aromatics and pulls out bitter compounds. Bring the water to a boil, then take it off the heat before pouring; hold the finished pot in a water bath or on the lowest possible warm setting.
- Water temperatureWater just off the boil falls into the 195–205F range generally accepted for extraction; water at a full rolling boil gives a harsher flavour.
- "The required quantity"Estes assumes the cook knows the pot. Two level tablespoons of ground coffee per 6 oz of water is the standard modern measure.
- GrindA drip basket needs a medium grind, about the texture of coarse sand. Anything as fine as espresso grind will clog the perforations and stall the water in the upper chamber.
- Five minutesThe five minutes is the standing time after the water is poured, and it is still about right for a drip pot. Pour the water in two or three additions rather than all at once so the bed stays evenly wetted.
- ServingDrink it within twenty minutes or so. Coffee held hot for an hour, even below boiling, turns flat and papery.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, who was born enslaved in Tennessee in the 1850s and went on to cook in Chicago restaurants, for the Pullman Company's private railroad cars, and later for a subsidiary of United States Steel. His book gives several coffee methods in a row, which suggests how contested the question was: American households of the period commonly boiled coffee outright, sometimes with an egg to clear it, and the drip or filter pot was the refined alternative associated with French practice. Estes's insistence that the water be kept hot but never boiled is the same principle every filter method rests on today, arrived at a century before anyone was measuring extraction yields.