Coffee Talk – The CorningWare "Drip-o-Lator"

Coffee – a dessert time beverage for some, a ritual of friendship for others, and a morning necessity for almost everyone else. It’s one of the hottest commodities on the planet, only shadowed by crude oil. I was originally preparing an exposé on Coffee, but once I started looking around the net I realized this approach has been done a million times already and there really isn’t anything of value I could add to the superfluity of information available. SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…… Let’s get a little more specific…

I am going to talk about brewing methods… I have several available to me, for I am one of the people who fall into all three categories… It is a dessert essential, a joy when congregating with friends and the necessary catalyst for my morning transformation from “swamp thing” to a human being.

For this first method, we are going to have to travel back in time to a dark point in American coffee culture… the 1960s…. a time when the sinister percolator ruled the household and mud was served daily… and even worse… people liked it. (shudder) It truly was a bleak time in American history. The percolator is the worst possible way to make coffee for several reasons.

• The water is actually boiling – This is too hot for proper extraction and makes for acidic highly caffeinated coffee.
• Once the extraction begins, the water saturated with “coffee” is heavier and falls to the bottom of the percolator, reheated to a boil and in effect burnt… then it ends up being shoved back up through the tube, to run back through the grounds again… Blech! (shudder)

Repeat after me…. Percolator is BAD…..

But dawn was breaking in the mid 60s… It was not the messiah of coffee brewing, but it was a step in the right direction… for the theory is similar to that of espresso… In 1965 Corningware released a new gizmo for coffee preparation…. The Drip-o-Lator. Now this is not to say they were responsible for a “Star Turn” in the saga of coffee extraction methods. That was already the province of Italy where Espresso was already being pulled from beautifully crafted machines. But, America was “waking up” to the realization of what coffee could be…

What the heck is a Drip-o-Lator you ask? Well, it’s basically a manual version of what most people set every night before going to bed.

It comes in several parts… So Lets begin and I’ll walk ya through it.

First, water must be heated in the kettle on the stove to between 200 and 205 degrees. NEVER use boiling water for coffee… not even with a French Press (Future post)

Now place coffee in the bottom receptacle (I use about 1.5 TB per cup for drip)

The glass bowl screws down onto the bottom receptacle.

Now this little plunger thing prevents the water from flowing from the glass bowl into the coffee ground receptacle.

Once the water is ready, carefully pour the hot water into the glass bowl.

Place the whole assembly into the pot.

Pull the plunger to allow the water to drip through the grounds

and into the pot below.

After about 4 minutes, (I usually whistle a little tune while I am waiting)

you have yourself a pot full of coffee.

Ah…

with just a little half & half to create a “Paper Bag Brown” color…

Awesome!!!

In case you are curious... The particular pattern (the Wheat) on my tea/coffee pot was originally planned as the standard design for Corningware, but in the company's haste to get the product to market, the cornflower was used instead and it eventually became the brand symbol of Corningware. Later, the wheat pattern was revisited and released on a limited number of pieces (I have seen a pie plate on eBay and I have a 4 quart roaster)

Cin Cin!!
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