In an interview by Krista Tippett for her radio program “On Being” physicist Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics, recalled playing with a coffee percolator. He remembered distinctly the seven pieces of the device and his joy at learning to disassemble and reassemble the pieces. I knew exactly what those seven pieces are. We had a similar percolator in our house when I was a child. The percolator consisted of:

The pot itself with a handle and spout.
The percolator base which sat on the bottom of the pot.
The stem which fit over the tube at the top of the base.
The basket which fit over the stem and held the coffee grounds.
The lid for the basket.
The lid of the pot.
The glass bulb that screwed into the center of the lid.

For years we had a camp percolator that had the stem and base formed as a single part, thus only six parts.

The device worked simply and elegantly. The water at the base of the pot, being closest to the stovetop heat, boiled first, sending a burst of hot water up the stem. It hit the glass bulb and dripped back down on the basket where it dripped through the lid of the basket, ran through the coffee grounds and dripped out the bottom. By setting the percolator in just the right spot on the stove to maintain the right temperature, the coffee would percolate without burning.

At some point our family switched to an electric percolator, freeing up a burner on the stove. I cannot remember if the early electric percolators had the base and stem as a single part, but it was essentially the same machine with an electric element forged into the base of the pot.

Electric percolators were scaled up to make 30, 50 and even 100 cups of coffee. You can still buy both stovetop and electric percolators at hardware stores or order one from Amazon. Percolators make a distinctive sound as the coffee is brewing. More than the sound, what I remember is the smell of coffee brewing in the morning. The aroma isn’t that distinctive from the smell of coffee brewing in a press or a drip machine, but the percolator and the aroma are linked in my childhood memory.

For many years I brewed my coffee with an expensive and complex espresso machine with a water tank, boiler, pump and valves to control steam and hot water. I had a tamper to get the density of the finely ground coffee just right in the portafilter. I enjoyed adding steamed milk to make a latte. I learned to take apart that machine and make repairs. Parts were readily available, but it took a bit of mechanical skill to replace o rings and valves and keep the machine running well.

I’m pretty sure I got into the habit of drinking too much coffee. In my sixties, I developed a slight heart rhythm condition and decided that the time had come for me to give up caffeine. I experienced some caffeine withdrawal headaches, but nothing too serious. At first I drank decaffeinated coffee and teas. These days I allow myself a bit of caffeine in the form of tea, but simply don’t drink coffee any more. A few years later my wife also gave up caffeine. We drink a fair amount of peppermint tea at our house.

We were talking and thinking about coffee and caffeine recently as we recalled stories of our elders. One of our family stories was an argument that my brother had with our mother when he was an adult. She was urging him to stop smoking. He declared that she had her own addictions and blurted, “I’ll stop smoking if you stop drinking coffee.” She accepted the challenge and immediately switched to hot water. From my point of view, she took to the change much easier than him. He was soon sneaking cigarettes and eventually started smoking again. I’m not sure that he ever admitted defeat, but it sure looked like she had bested him. Later she returned to drinking coffee. Telling the story, I realized that one factor in her ability to quit cold turkey may have been the fact that although she drank coffee constantly during her waking hours, she didn’t make her coffee very strong at all. I’m pretty sure that several cups of her coffee had less caffeine than a single shot of espresso.

My wife’s grandparents drank coffee constantly. The coffee maker was started by the first person who got up in the morning and whoever poured the last cup immediately started a fresh pot of coffee. They had coffee with their meals and with snacks throughout the day including a couple of cups with a bedtime snack. They also complained every morning about not being able to sleep well. When we visited them there were two things you could count on - a cup of coffee placed in front of you as soon as you got up - and a conversation about how difficult it was for her grandmother and grandfather to sleep. Her grandfather lived into his nineties and her grandmother made it to 100 years old, so I guess the effects of caffeine were tolerated by them even if they had trouble sleeping.

Her grandparents also served and ate potatoes at three meals every day, but that is another story entirely.

They lived in North Dakota, which is where my wife learned to drink coffee. When we married, she didn’t drink coffee at all. I had started drinking coffee my freshman year in college when I found that other hot beverages tended to make me sleepy. I needed to stay awake and alert to process all of the college reading and so started drinking coffee. She made it through college and graduate school without drinking coffee. But when we moved to North Dakota, people didn’t ask whether or not you wanted coffee. They just served you a cup when you stopped by for a visit. Susan, being a very polite person, started drinking the coffee. Before long, she was drinking coffee every day. But in North Dakota, at least at that time, the coffee was like my mother’s coffee - extremely weak - barely colored brown.

So, yes, I do know the parts of a percolator even though we don’t own one. I can even write a 1,000 word essay on the topic!