Vintage Coffee on a Lazy Sunday Morning

Happy Sunday everyone! It already feels like one of those lazy days when you just don’t want to leave the comfort of your bed, the Sunday papers are calling, and the coffee is bubbling away on the hob. I actually had a rather late night out at a hangar dance last night, so I definitely need a lie-in today! It’s also a great excuse to try out my ‘new’ coffee pot…

Okay, it’s a very very old coffee pot, which my husband just picked up from the car boot sale. It was being sold on one of those stalls that I just walk past without really looking, thinking that everything there is too dirty and decrepit, even by my standards. But it’s always at these ‘emptied the attic’ car boot stalls that hubby always finds the best hidden gems, and the coffee pot was no exception. If it wasn’t for his eagle-eye and willingness to see beyond the dirt, we wouldn’t be enjoying a freshly percolated coffee today!

And boy did this coffee pot need a good good clean. I’ve taken some photos of it before the scrubbing commenced (in fact it’d already had two normal washes before these photos were taken!) then I set to work with a scouring pad and a heck of a lot of washing-up liquid. I figured that even using a metal scourer would make it look better than the years-of-coffee tarnished finish it was currently sporting. I’ve taken a photo of part of the pot mid-clean (above) so that you can see the difference it made. I didn’t mind the half hour of elbow grease it took to bring the coffee pot back to life because it looked SO much better afterwards.

I don’t know why, but I originally thought that this might be a French coffee pot. The ornate decoration around the pot, the carved handle and the pretty pouty spout just looked French to me but after I cleaned all the years of hob gunk off the bottom of the pot I could see that the inscription on the base said British Made Diamond 143-S. I’ve Googled these details but even though I found lots of other types of coffee pots and cafetières, I couldn’t find the same one so haven’t been able to find out anything more about the age or origins of the pot. One thing’s for sure, I’m glad that my husband picked it up from that dusty car boot stall because I’m really pleased with how lovely my vintage made-in-the-UK coffee percolator is now that’s it’s been cleaned up.

With a coffee pot like this, it requires course ground coffee, which sits in the drum at the top of the pot and the water boils up and bubbles up through it to percolate the coffee. I really enjoy watching the coffee blipping away in the ornate glass lid and seeing the colour of the water get darker as it percolates. But of course we couldn’t start brewing our coffee without the course-ground coffee itself. This was virtually impossible to find at the supermarket, and the closest thing we could get was coffee beans. Unfortunately, we don’t have a grinder yet, so it would have been a case of using the blender to grind up the coffee – is that a good way to do it, or not? In the end, we went to the only place that we knew we could get the correct level of grind for the pot, which was Whittard of Chelsea. Since needing a specific type of coffee grounds for this pot, I’ve now discovered that there are many different types of grind; from whole beans, to cafetière grind, espresso grind, filter grind and finally Turkish grind. We chose an omni-grind Guatemalan coffee in a medium/dark roast. It was mostly because the name on the canister said Guatemala Elephant and that had me hooked! As you can probably tell from my all baking posts, I’ve got a bit of a sweet tooth so while we were shopping I got some caramel and amaretto syrups to occasionally add to my coffee – the ultimate Sunday morning treat! I love having flavoured coffee when I go out for a drink in a coffee shop, so I’m really chuffed that I could recreate the same tastes at home with these syrups.

So you can imagine the scene in my home this morning, with coffee percolating away, the house filling with the aroma of fresh coffee, the radio burbling away in the background and a fluffy cat on my lap. Needless to say the coffee is delicious and I think that the times it takes to percolate only adds to the coffe drinking experience. I’m so pleased with the coffee pot and how well it works with the coffee grounds. Of course, my morning drink has been made all the more tasty with the addition of the caramel syrup and I want another one right now. I don’t think Sunday’s get much better than this! What are you up to today and what’s your favourite type of coffee? Leave me a comment below and we’ll chat soon