Home › Beverages › How to Make Coffee
How to Make Coffee
The best method of making coffee, as determined by the Better Coffee-Making Committee of the National Association of Coffee Roasters, after through experiment and correspondence with experts, is as follows: "Fill a kettle with fresh cold water and put it on to boil. Place over an open china teapot, kept just for coffee (as metal is deleterious), a clean, wet, old linen napkin, or a new square of unbleached muslin, letting it sag toward the center. Put into the depression 4 heaping tablespoons (for 4 cups of coffee) of finely pulverized coffee. This fine pulverization is very important. Ordinary ground coffee will not do at all, and gives weak infusions. "When the water in the kettle is boiling fiercely, pour it through the coffee slowly until 4 cups have gene through, or a trifle more, for 4 cups of coffee. "Cover and take at once to table. "Wash the cloth immediately after breakfast and keep it in a jar of cold water, never permitting it to get dry, and freshening the water every day. Keeping the cloth sweet is absolutely essential. Every effort should be made to this end. The least souring ruins the coffee. "Follow these directions strictly, paying especial attention to having the coffee very fine, like flour, and the water boiling, and you will have excellent coffee even though you buy cheap blends."
This is pour-over coffee through a cloth filter, written before paper filters were common in American kitchens. Two of its instructions run against current practice, and one is worth following exactly.
- The hinge is the grindThe recipe insists on coffee "pulverized... like flour," which is finer than drip grind and closer to espresso or Turkish. With a cloth filter and a slow pour that fineness is what gives body; with anything coarser you will get the weak infusion the committee warns about.
- Water off the boil"Boiling fiercely" was the standard advice of the period. Modern practice brews at 195-205F, so let a full boil stand about 30 seconds before pouring. Water at a hard rolling boil scalds fine grounds and pulls out harsh, bitter compounds.
- What a cup means hereA coffee cup in this period is roughly 6 fl oz, not 8. Four "cups" is about 24 oz of finished coffee, or two mugs. Four heaping tablespoons of very fine coffee works out near 30-35 g, a little lighter than the modern standard ratio for that volume.
- The clothAn unbleached muslin square or a cotton coffee sock does the job; so does a #4 paper cone in a dripper set over the pot. Rinse a new cloth in hot water before its first use to take off any sizing or dressing.
- Do not store the cloth as directedKeeping a used coffee cloth in a jar of room-temperature water, refreshed daily, is exactly the practice the recipe then admits will ruin the coffee if it sours. Rinse the cloth clean and keep it in water in the refrigerator, or simply let it dry fully between uses and replace it often.
- Metal potsThe objection to metal likely reflects the tinned and enamelled ware of the time, which could pit and hold rancid coffee oils. Stainless steel and glass are inert and fine. The instinct behind the rule still holds: whatever the pot is made of, wash out the oils, since stale coffee residue is a common cause of bad coffee at home.
- Serve immediately"Cover and take at once to table" is the right instruction. Coffee held on heat or in a covered china pot goes flat within about 20 minutes; a preheated pot buys a little time, reheating buys none.
The National Coffee Roasters Association, an American trade body organised in 1911, ran a sustained campaign to improve how coffee was actually brewed in homes and restaurants. Its Better Coffee-Making Committee issued directions of this kind for reprinting in newspapers, pamphlets and cookbooks like this one, which is why the text arrives quoted rather than written by the book's compiler. The method itself is filter, or drip, coffee at a moment when American households still boiled grounds loose in a pot, or used an egg to clear the grounds, or ran a percolator; cloth filtering was the older refinement, generally traced to French practice of the early nineteenth century, and the modern paper filter is usually credited to Melitta Bentz in Germany, who patented it in 1908, but had not yet displaced muslin here. The trade insisted on a flour-fine grind, and the closing promise that the method redeems "cheap blends" tells you who the pamphlet was really for.