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Dripped Coffee
One-half pint Java coffee ground and put in the dripper. Pour over it two and one-half pints boiling water. If not strong enough, pass through the dripper a second time.--Mrs. J. R. McD.
A drip pot recipe from the era before paper filters, when "dripper" meant a two-chamber metal pot with a perforated plate. The proportions translate directly to modern brewing.
- The measuresA half pint of ground coffee is one cup, roughly 3 oz or 85 g by weight depending on grind and bean. Two and a half pints of water is 5 cups, about 1,180 ml. That works out near 72 g per liter, a little stronger than the modern standard of 60 g per liter.
- What a dripper wasNot a drip coffeemaker but a stacked tin or enameled pot: grounds sat on a perforated plate in an upper chamber, water was poured over, and the brew fell into the pot below. A pour-over cone or a Chemex reproduces it closely; a French press does not, since immersion extracts differently.
- Java coffeeOriginally beans from the island of Java, then a general term for good-quality coffee, much as "mocha" was. Any medium-roast Indonesian or Central American coffee suits the recipe.
- GrindHome mills of the period gave a coarser, less even grind than a modern burr grinder, which may be part of why the recipe allows for a weak first result. A medium grind, about the texture of coarse sand, should give full extraction on a single pass and make the second pass unnecessary.
- Skip the second passRunning the finished coffee back through spent grounds pulls out the bitter, astringent compounds that remain after the pleasant ones are gone. If the brew is thin, add more coffee or grind finer rather than repeating the pour.
- Water temperatureWater poured straight off a rolling boil over-extracts the grounds. Let it stand off the boil for a minute or so, to somewhere around 200F.
- YieldAbout 4 cups of finished coffee, allowing for what the grounds absorb. Serve at once; drip pots held over heat to keep warm go flat and bitter.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housewives, gives several coffee methods side by side, which tells you the question was still open in an American kitchen of the period. Boiled coffee, cleared with eggshell or a bit of fish skin, was the older and commoner practice; the drip pot was the refined alternative, descended from the filter pots whose invention is traditionally credited to De Belloy, generally identified as the Archbishop of Paris, while the English Biggin pot, dating from the 1780s, is said to take its name from a maker about whom little else is remembered. Because the water never boils in contact with the grounds, drip coffee was praised as less bitter and more economical of the bean, and recipes like this one are signed with initials rather than a full name.