A massive coffee urn - serious caffeine delivery system

I grew up when coffee was made in a percolating device. It was put on top of the gas or electric stove and you watched the coffee go blub-blub into and out of the little glass viewing portal on the top of the pot. That was for everyday coffee and it made the house smell real nice. 

You got your coffee grinds at the local A&P supermarket from a big red and chrome electric coffee grinding machine. There were few safety guards on the beast and it regularly nipped off the fingertips of small children and less sharp parents that would go on later in life to get stuck in the refrigerators because they wanted to know if the lights stayed on if the door was closed. The difference then was that if you did something stupid you paid your own doctor bills and you either got smarter or just did not make it - I digress.

Sometimes when there was a family gathering or you got dragged to some Cub Scout thing

at the school the really big coffee making machine got hauled out. It was about three feet tall and made enough caffeinated sludge to keep all of the adults animated enough to make sure the kids did not kill each other playing dodgeball or kept them awake during the award presentations. Still this was an amateur coffee making device compared to the copper monster pictured here.

We found this one some time ago and just fell in love with it. I don't think that it actually works but I do remember seeing machines like this during our trips to the 1964 worlds fair or when we stopped at the automat in NYC after a double decker train ride from the east end of Long Island. I cannot imagine today with $6 cups of designer coffee what the value of the inventory these babies held would be - but I am sure that the coffee tasted pretty good.



Anybody that drank coffee from one of these is probably pretty damn old and would hate todays Dunkin-Star-buck-corporate coffee when remembering a good old cup served up in a two pound porcelain mug that looked like it had been washed 10,000 times. Served with real milk and a couple of heaps of sugar - hmm.