What’s a coffee maker? If you’ve even had a cup of coffee, you know it takes a machine of some kind to make it. Coffee makers are these machines.

Coffee machines are categorized as small appliances and are a staple appliance in many homes across the globe.

How do they work? Every coffee machine has a different type of internal mechanisms designed to make coffee.

The general idea is to have a filter where you place coffee grounds and then boiling hot water is poured/dispensed from the maker through the filter or funnel where liquid coffee drips into a carafe, coffee pot, or a cup.

This kind of machine is referred to as an automatic drip style of coffee maker.

How was coffee discovered? No one knows where the discovery of coffee actually began. The most popular story is a legend out of Ethiopia where a goat herder recognized his flock getting more energetic after eating some read berries from a bush.

He picked the berries and reported what was happening to a local monastery.

The monk didn’t like the concept of what the berries were doing to the goats and tossed them into the fire.

The fire roasted the berries, which created a pleasant fragrance, we now know as roasting coffee beans. The roasted beans were gathered, grinded, and dissolved in hot water. That is where the first cup of coffee came from according to this legend.

It didn’t take long for the word to spread about these energizing little berries. It soon reached the Arabian Peninsula and traveled all over the globe from there.

Today, it’s a staple beverage that is wildly popular, second only to water.

Who invented the coffee filter? The first coffee filter was invented by a woman named Melitta Bentz, a German housewife.

Her goal was to make coffee taste less bitter by filtering the boiled coffee through a filter. After much trial and error, she finally used blotting papers from her son’s school workbook.

What types of coffee makers are there? Coffee makers have been around since the 1700s when the pumping percolator was invented. The 1800s brought ingenuity to the appliance with the vacuum brewers.

By 1889, the coffee percolator was the popular device used to brew coffee. Percolator-style coffee makers were popular until the invention of the electric drip machines in the 1970s.

Today we have the following types of coffee makers.

• Single-Serve Machines: The single-serve coffee maker has only become popular in the past 24 years when Keurig manufacture its first model in 1992. Today, single-serve makers are in many homes all over the world. Most of them require a prefilled pod or a small permanent filter pod you put grounds in and place in the container where the hot water flows through and dispenses coffee into a single cup. These coffee makers often allow for more than one size and now also offer the larger carafe size in some models.
• Automatic Drip: The automatic drip coffee maker, designed in the 70s became popular quickly with housewives across America. These are still made and used to brew coffee. They come in a variety of styles, cup capacities, models, colors, and prices. You put a filter in the attached funnel, add coffee grounds, turn it on, and the hot water dispenses and drips into a carafe.
• French Press: The French Press is one of the most sustainable ways to make coffee. It requires that the grounds be coarser than what you need for automatic drip or single-serve makers. The water and coffee grounds are placed into the same glass container and left to brew for several minutes. It has a plunger you press to trap the grounds and release the coffee liquid. It is considered the purist and cleanest way to make coffee.
• Espresso Machines: Espresso is yet another form of coffee that is stronger than regular brewed coffee. The first espresso machine was patented in 1884. Today, espresso makers are much like coffee makers with the exception of a step that creates the higher concentration of coffee known as espresso.

Coffee makers have evolved over the years from merely adding ground fire-roasted coffee berries to a cup of hot water to machines that drip hot water through a filter.

Coffee machines like espresso makers, cappuccino makers, latte makers, and multi-function coffee makers are readily available and are mostly affordable for almost anyone to own.