She Invented the Dripper for Better Coffee! Who Invented Pour-Over Coffee? Who Was Mrs. Melitta?

The Art of Pour-Over Coffee

There are countless ways to make coffee, and different brewing methods impart unique flavors to the beverage. Among these numerous methods, pour-over coffee stands out with its special advantages—being quick, convenient, clean, and producing excellent flavor. It has become one of the mainstream coffee brewing methods popular worldwide today.

Pour-over coffee is essentially drip extraction! By filtering coffee liquid through a filter cone placed over a container, you can enjoy the cleanest, most delicious coffee in the most convenient way. In other words, the core component of pour-over coffee is the "filter cone." When speaking of filter cones, we must mention a particular woman—whose "refined" persistence led to the birth of the filter cone! So today, FrontStreet Coffee will discuss how this woman invented the filter cone.

The Origin of the Filter Cone

Before the filter cone was invented, coffee brewing methods worldwide mainly consisted of "boiling." Turkish coffee and Ethiopian coffee were both made by adding flour-like coffee powder to boiling water. After brewing, there would be a waiting period to allow the coffee grounds to settle, reducing the intake of coffee residue when drinking.

Later, people learned to use cloth as a filtering tool to screen out most coffee grounds, optimizing the drinking experience. For a long time, "cloth-filtered coffee" became mainstream in the coffee world. However, the disadvantages of using cloth as a filter were quite obvious! First, due to manufacturing limitations, the gaps in the cloth were quite large openings for coffee grounds, making it difficult to filter them out completely. Second, cloth was relatively expensive, so people could only reuse it through repeated cleaning. But cleaning could hardly remove the coffee grounds and stains attached to the cloth, which easily led to unpleasant odors. This was quite a troubling issue for people at that time. Until later, the appearance of a particular woman completely changed this undesirable situation. She was—Amalie Auguste Melitta Bentz.

Although most people today don't know her, she was another important woman who advanced coffee development besides Mrs. Eva Nilsen. Melitta was born in 1873 in Dresden, eastern Germany. She had a special passion—coffee! Having two cups of coffee daily was perhaps the most delightful thing for her. However, she was a perfectionist. Despite drinking coffee frequently, she couldn't tolerate the coffee grounds that affected the experience! Therefore, she began pondering how to find a filter that could perfectly separate coffee grounds. Until one day, she found inspiration from her son's blotting paper. (Blotting paper is a type of paper made from chemical wood pulp or cotton pulp, used to absorb excess ink remaining on paper.) Blotting paper has a loose texture and allows excess liquid to permeate through when saturated (full of water). It was precisely this characteristic that gave Melitta her breakthrough. She immediately took a copper bowl from home, punched small holes in it, placed blotting paper and coffee grounds in the bowl sequentially, and finally poured hot water over it. Clean, clear coffee liquid dripped through the holes. Thus, a completely new coffee brewing method was born.

(This isn't that copper bowl! Just an illustration) After multiple modifications to her filter, on June 20, 1908, 37-year-old Melitta officially registered her invention at the Royal Patent Office: a copper coffee filter cone with a domed bottom and water outlet holes! This was the birth of the world's first drip coffee filter cone. She then used her savings to establish the "Melitta Company" and used her personal signature "Melitta" as the product trademark.

However, in Western countries, such a convenient device didn't receive much use. People there preferred more convenient, quick coffee brewing methods, and with the popularization of espresso machines, very few people used filter cones. Instead, in Japan, across most of the globe, people were obsessed with drip brewing. They not only developed various exquisite filter cones but also researched different brewing methods through theoretical study. This played a significant role in spreading pour-over coffee!

And so, pour-over coffee became popular worldwide, becoming one of the mainstream coffee extraction methods today. But who could have imagined at the beginning that the prototype of these exquisite filters was once just a household copper bowl long ago?

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