Some, make coffee with spring water, but it is not so good as river, or Thames-water, because the former makes it hard, and distasteful, and the other makes it smooth and pleasant, lying soft on the stomach. If you have a desire to make good coffee in your families, I cannot conceive how you can put less than two ounces of powder to a quart, or one ounce to a pint of water; some put two ounces and a quarter.
By 1760, the decoction, or boiling, method in France had been generally replaced by the infusion, or steeping, method.
In 1763, Donmartin, a tinsmith of St. Bendit, France, invented a coffee pot, the inside of which was "filled by a fine sack put in its entirety," and which had a tap to draw the coffee. Many inventions to make coffee sans ebullition (without boiling) appeared in France about this time; but it was not until 1800 that De Belloy's pot, employing the original French drip method, appeared, signaling another step forward in coffee making—percolation.
De Belloy and Count Rumford
De Belloy's pot was probably made of iron or tin, afterward of porcelain; and it has served as a model for all the percolation devices that followed it for the next hundred years. It does not seem to have been patented, and not much is known of the inventor. About this period, it was the common practise in England to boil coffee in the good old-fashioned way, and to "fine" (clarify) it with isinglass. This moved Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson), an American-British scientist, then living in Paris, to make a study of scientific coffee-making, and to produce an improved drip device known as Rumford's percolator. He has been generally credited with the invention of the percolator; but, as pointed out in a previous chapter, this honor seems to be De Belloy's and not Rumford's.
Count Rumford embodied his observations and conclusions in a verbose essay entitled Of the excellent qualities of coffee and the art of making it in the highest perfection, published in London in 1812. In this treatise he describes and illustrates the Rumford percolator.
Brillat-Savarin, the famous French gastronomist, who also wrote on coffee in his VIme Meditation, said of the De Belloy pot:
I have tried, in the course of time, all methods and of all those which have been suggested to me up to today (1825) and with a full knowledge of the matter in hand. I prefer the De Belloy method, which consists of pouring the boiling water upon the coffee which has been placed in the vessel of porcelain or silver, pierced with very small holes. I have attempted to make coffee in a boiler at high pressure, but I have had as a result a coffee full of extracts and bitterness which would scrape the throat of a Cossack.
Brillat-Savarin had something also to say on the subject of grinding coffee, his conclusion being that it was "better to pound the coffee than to grind it."
He refers to M. Du Belloy, archbishop of Paris, "who loved good things and was quite an epicure," and says that Napoleon showed him deference and respect. This may have been Jean Baptiste De Belloy, who, according to Didot, was born in 1709 and died in 1808, and, it is thought likely, was the inventor of the De Belloy pot.