French Press Coffee

The earliest patent for a plunger pot belongs to two French inventors, Henri-Otto Mayer and Jacques-Victor Delforge, in 1852, but their design left no seal around the filter and pushed as much sediment up as it held back ¹. The mechanism that fixed that problem, a spring-loaded disc sealing against the glass as it descends, was patented by the Milanese designers Giulio Moneta and Attilio Calimani in 1929, and it is their design that the modern press descends from rather than the earlier French one ².

The most widely sold version came later still. Faliero Bondanini patented a further refinement in 1958 and had it manufactured in France, at a factory that had previously made clarinets, under the name Chambord ². That pot, sold in Britain as La Cafetière and eventually produced by the Danish company Bodum, is the shape now most associated with the device, despite the method's Italian mechanism and the earlier French patent it is popularly named for ².

The brewing principle has stayed constant while the hardware changed hands: coarse grounds steep loose in the full volume of water, with nothing filtering them until the plunger is pressed, so the cup carries the coffee's oils and fine sediment in a way a paper filter strains out ¹. That is also the method's one real fault. Coffee left standing on its grounds after the plunge continues to extract through the wet bed trapped beneath the mesh, which is why a press left on the table rather than decanted keeps getting more bitter the longer it sits.