Bleached coffee filters bother you? Go gold!

More consumers are concerned about the bleach used in paper filters. ‘Today’ food editor Phil Lempert discusses alternatives

By Phil Lempert
"Today" Food Editor

In the "olden days," somewhere in the early 1600s, London coffee houses were the epicenter of lively conversation, business deals and a continuously available pot of coffee, all for a penny.

Coffee had been introduced to England, and all of Europe, by traders from Arabia and Africa, who brought back with them the coffee-making customs of the regions where coffee was first discovered.

At first, coffee grounds weren’t filtered but allowed to sink to the bottom of the pot. If any effort was made to clear the brew, some fabric or an old sock was wrapped around the grounds, and coffee brewers (people, not machines) squeezed it tightly to get every last drop out of the sock and into the cup. (The “coffee sock” is a fixture even today in some parts of the world. It’s easy to use and can be rinsed out to be used over and over again, but the flavor of the textile, whether it be hemp, cotton, wool or burlap, can definitely be tasted in the brew.)

The birth of paper filters

Since then there has been continual innovation to perfect the filtering out of coffee grounds and sediment, though the first patented filters — made of metal and introduced in France in 1802 — actually didn’t filter grounds so much as help the water drip evenly over the grounds.

Although Mr. Coffee popularized the thin paper filter here in America beginning in 1975, the main credit goes to Melitta Bentz, a German woman who thought that she could make coffee less bitter by pouring boiling water over ground coffee, then filtering out the liquid. She experimented with many types of paper, settling on her son’s ink blotter paper (used during the days of pen and ink in the classroom). The year was 1908, the patent was filed by Bentz and her husband, Hugo, and paper-filter history began.

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