| Our search for the ultimate RV boondocking coffee pot.
(Note: One size does not fit all. If your taste is for percolated on the stovetop, or Cowboy coffee, great! But we prefer good drip coffee. Whatever works for each is perfect! This is just our choice) After our first year of fulltiming we realized that we needed a coffee pot that made drip coffee on the stove, just like Granny's old aluminum stovetop Wear-ever coffee pot she called her "dripolator." Granny lived on a farm and would make all of her coffee on the stove with her old pot. It was better than anything our electric drip machine could make. All you did was fill the filter compartment with coffee, and screw it onto the top. The you set the top in the bottom half, boiled water in a separate pot or kettle, and pour it into the top half. It dripped down and made the best drip coffee we ever tasted. Granny left us many years before we started Rving, but we were sure someone had that old coffeepot stored somewhere. Well! We went home and remembering how good the coffee that Granny made in it was, we asked my Father-in-law if he had it stashed somewhere. He said he was sure it was around somewhere, but after several days of searching we decided it was not to be found. But we really needed a way to make coffee when boondocking on the stove! The obvious solution, if you aren't into "French presses" and plastic cones on top of a pot, are the glass stovetop percolators. So we got one! He he, we don't need power! So we tried it out, and . . .well . . . it was . . .well . . .lousy! Ugh! It was not what we needed and was glass besides. So we figured there ought to be a lot of those old "dripolators" out there, and all we had to do was go to yard sales and flea markets and we would find one for a few bucks. Two years of looking and nada, zilch, zip! Then we were at "Pike's Market" in Seattle, and found an old much fancier "antique" drip stovetop pot that they wanted 50 bucks for. Hey I was ready buy it, but my SH (significant harassment) said "are you crazy? We'll find my granny's old pot when we get home!" 50 bucks? So we returned and looked for the pot one more time. No such luck. But the next year, we stayed at the Sutherlin Oregon SKP park, and the town had a flea market. We went and lo and behold found a stovetop drip coffee maker that was stainless steel, but was missing a part. The lady was nice enough to invite us over to her place after the sale, and would look for the missing part. We showed, and the part was nowhere to be found. Remember, we had been looking for two years by now. We thanked her and she asked us to wait a minute. She would call a friend of her's who she thought might have what we were looking for. Called her up and she said she might have what we wanted, but lived alone on a mountain and would meet us at a specified time at the base of the mountain. OK, I was willing, but it was getting very strange. I told her to tell her friend that I would have my wife with me, thinking that perhaps she was just worried about meeting a strange man alone. Nope! The lady said that our one ton diesel dually would not be able to make it up the road. OK, now it was strange enough that I was going no matter what. My SH said that we weren't paying 50 bucks either. The next day we showed and the lady wasn't there, so I started up the mountain road, figuring to save her a few minutes. We couldn't get past the first 1/4 mile, and thankfully found a big enough turn around to get back down after oh . . say thirty or forty back and forths. We waited another 15 mins at the bottom and then a 4WD driven by a crazy person nearly sideswiped us, and stopped in a cloud of dust just in front of us. A lady got out that in another time would have been mistaken for Calamity Jane. She asked us in a much gentler voice than we expected, if we were the folks looking for the coffee maker? I said why yes, and she proceeded to tell me that when she said I couldn't make it up the hill she wasn't kidding, and she was glad she found us. She went back to her 4X4 and pulled out, an exact duplicate of Grannie's old coffee pot. It was a Wear-Ever model 966. A little dented and needing some cleaning, but all there!! We were both so excited that we told her how long we had been looking for one just like it (bad negotiating move I know) and she was just tickled that we were so excited over her old coffee pot. So I asked her what she wanted for it, glancing at my SH, and seeing that "No 50 dollar coffee pots in our house," look. The lady said that it was so old and dirty that she was just going to give it to us seeing as how we drove all the way up there for it. Huh? We had lived in Europe for seven years while I was in the Air Force, and had a bag of foreign coins that we saved for just such situations. You can't exchange coins and we had em from everywhere. So I told the lady, that after all of our searching all over the continent for exactly that pot we couldn't take it for nothing. You could see that she was about to be insulted and said that she was not taking a penny for it, take it or leave it! Sheesh! I reached in the truck and pulled out my bag of coins and explained that they were worth nothing here, but were unique and if she would pick out four or five she liked, we would feel a lot better about it. Her face lit up, and she spent almost ten minutes picking her coins. Then she said that she was a coin collector, and had no foreign coins like the ones we had, and would be tickled to trade! LOL! Amazing how things work out. So why did we have such trouble finding an old drip stovetop coffee maker? Later I found out why. It seems that in the 40's many of them were turned in patriotically as scrap, and had the side benefit that the housewife would be able to get an electric coffee maker instead! Hi tech for then. Thus the scarcity of them today. Again, in looking on the web for coffee makers like ours, I found only a few, and only one for sale. But the real news is this! I found that the new Neapolitan coffee makers are the same basic thing, except you don't need a separate pot to boil the water in like ours! You use the top to heat the water and put the bottom on upside down with the coffee, and turn it right side up and it brews an even better cup of coffee. And they come in stainless steel as well as aluminum, like ours, but an even better design. Ours is ours, and I won't buy one of the new ones, just because of the story behind our search for ours. But had I known about the ones below, I would have definitely gone for one. Here's what we have - a Wear-Ever 966 (BTW the ad erroneously refers
to it as a percolator-it's a drip!) http://pages.tias.com/3036/PictPage/1008462.html
Here are other antique and classic coffee makers with pics and our wearever is in there too, but there are some good comments about the plastic funnels and glass drip Chemex units. http://www.jitterbuzz.com/indcof.html Here are the new stove top dripolators but now they are called Italian Neapolitan style. And you don't need a separate pot or kettle to boil the water in, like our old Wear-Ever! Great buy for Rvrs. Neapolitan coffee makers in stainless steel http://www.1st-line.com/machines/home_mod/eg/30SSseri.htm and in aluminum http://www.1st-line.com/machines/home_mod/eg/30series.htm Ceramic dripolator Breakable but similar in function to our Wear-ever. http://www.collectablememories.com/items/dripolater.html So that's our story, and what we found to be, for us, the perfect boondocking
coffeepot. With alternatives for new ones!!
©Derek Gore / RV Roadie 1998 - 2002 |