Shiny! Coffee! Shiny! Coffee!

Would you LOOK at that thing? Can you even bear gazing upon the beauty of this object? Doesn’t it fill you with awe and an overwhelming lust to own it? It does me, and that’s why I bought it.

Say hello to my new coffee maker. It’s a vintage 1951 West Bend Flavo-Matic Percolating Coffee Maker and it’s eight cups of gorgeous coffee-making power. It’s red anodized aluminum and has a Bakelite handle and its original power cord, complete with Bakelite plug. And the entire thing still works like a dream.

This is the point at which Guy is mentally composing a comment along the lines of, “Percolated coffee? Sure, that’s fine if you enjoy drinking CRAP.” To that I preemptively respond: Ha! Yes, I admit that the very first batch that I made could accurately be described as the aforementioned crap. But that was to be expected considering my lack of percolator experience and things have improved dramatically since then. Drop the size of the grind, up the amount of coffee and the time of the brew and voila! Coffee as good as what I used to get out of my (now deceased) french press! My only complaint is that I end up drinking far too much coffee when I use this pot as I feel obligated to drink all eight cups.

Admire the percolator. Revel in its “House of Tomorrow” styling. Bask in the glow of the shiny red aluminum. Envy its very lucky owner.