It may not be the best automatic drip coffee maker available, but the Mr. Coffee coffee maker was the first brand to hit the market in 1972. In business, you either have to be the first or the best if you want to have guaranteed success. Okay, so you can get away with being second best and still succeed, but it's not guaranteed.

Mr. Coffee and Joe DiMaggio

When the commercials started appearing on television in 1972, Joe DiMaggio was the celebrity spokesman pitching it for the company. Joe DiMaggio was a famous baseball player who played exclusively for the New York Yankees from 1936 to 1951. He died in 1999 at the age of 84, the age my own father is right now. Anyway, automatic drip coffee makers, like Mr. Coffee, suddenly started appearing in kitchens across America.

I don't know if it was the product or Joe that convinced my mother to buy a Mr. Coffee, but she bought one nevertheless. I don't remember exactly when she bought it; I know she bought before we moved to Hawaii in 1974.

Automatic Drip Coffee Makers versus Coffee Percolators

When the automatic drip coffee makers first came out, the coffee didn't taste as good after brewing as it did with percolators. The trouble was that the grind available in most stores was still designed for percolators. After the grind specifically made for automatic drip coffee hit the market, I couldn't tell the difference anymore.

There are some that lament to obsolescence of the percolators, saying they were more "green" than the automatic drip coffee makers are. They cite the paper being used for the filters and water evaporation as being "non-green".

They obviously haven't heard that certain fast-growing trees are being used solely for the paper and yet it's still recyclable. The new trees reach maturity before they're even needed. I don't buy the water evaporation part. A percolator put out as much steam as an automatic drip coffee maker. I only had to put my hand above a spout one time to find that out.

In this day and age, the best coffee makers for home use are automatic drip coffee makers because they're more widely supported by the coffee industry. As with any technology, that may change and something better may come along.

Popular Culture

Unlike other brands, the Mr. Coffee has become a cultural icon. It was parodied as "Mr. Fusion" in the Back to the Future movie trilogy and as "Mr. Radar" and "Mr. Rental" in the Spaceballs movie. The actual coffee maker made cameo appearances in TV shows and other movies, playing itself and has been included in the lyrics to songs and gets referenced in short stories.

I don't know what the Mr. Coffee automatic drip coffee maker did to be such a popular cultural icon. Oh yeah, it was first.

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I shouldn't really say "old-fashioned", but I couldn't think of another way to describe coffee makers that most people don't use anymore. The Pyrex coffee percolator pictured is the exact style of coffee pot that my mother and older sisters used when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s.

Pyrex

"Pyrex" is a word that was made up by Corning Incorporated in 1915. Although they sold the consumer products division in 1998, "Corning Incorporated" still appears at the Pyrex web portal. They no longer sell any kind of coffee pots, from what I can see.

Pyrex is a brand name that was synonymous with glass. It didn't matter what type of glass they used although they originally used borosilicate glass. I believe they now use soda lime glass. I also believe their glassware is tempered and heat resistant. I'm relying on memory, but I never saw any glass coffee percolators crack.

Operation

The glass coffee percolators that I've seen operate in the same ways. I understand there is another kind that operates a little differently, but I've never seen one in person.

Coffee grounds are placed in a basket at the top of long cylindrical tube which almost reaches the sides of the basket. I've never seen any baskets made from anything besides aluminum. The tube for a glass coffee percolator is also made of glass and the pedestal at the bottom, which rests against the bottom of the pot, is made of glass as well. In fact, the only other metal part of this particular coffee maker is the band that goes around it. I don't remember if the band served to secure the handle or not.

After the coffee is brewed to the point of completion, usually when the coffee is dark brown, the heat is lowered enough just to keep the coffee pot warm. I can remember many times when the coffee sat long enough to be considered burnt. It tasted nasty at that point. I used to watch the liquid percolate; I could see it hitting the inside knob of the lid. I think the lid was designed the way it was for exactly that reason.

During times of little money, my mother and siblings used to re-use the coffee grounds. It took longer for the coffee to brew the second time and it usually never got as dark as the first time. A third time was out of the question. I think modern automatic drip coffee grounds can't be used in the same way, but I've never tested any to find out.

Metal Coffee Percolators

A cursory search using Google Image Search will reveal coffee percolators of all kinds still in existence, though none quite like the image I found that matched what my mother used. There were others that I remember, like the metal coffee pots that were used during camping trips. They operated in the same way, but brewing time had to be estimated because the liquid couldn't be seen.

Some of the images I found on Google were misleading. Some younger people might be fooled when they see an image of a coffee decanter versus a coffee percolator. The decanters are only used to keep coffee hot for serving. They can't be used as coffee makers in any way, shape or form. Some of them appear to be metal and aren't — they're made of plastic that looks like metal.

Image Source

I spent hours going from website to website looking for the particular model to use as a thumbnail for this article. Trust me when I say that I only found one site that had it displayed and it was with a message that said "out of stock". It was a Japanese website, but for the life of me, I can't find it again. I'll be happy to credit the image to the appropriate source if someone can point it out to me. Because I believe in "fair use", I did not provide the larger, original image and the image used is at a much lower resolution.

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