French Drip Pot (Du Belloy)

The French drip pot, or cafetière du Belloy, is the ancestor of filter coffee. It appeared in Paris around 1800: a tall pot in two parts, with ground coffee held on a finely perforated grid in the top and the coffee dripping into the pot below as boiling water is poured through. It was one of the first ways to make coffee without boiling it, and the gastronome Brillat-Savarin declared it the best method he knew. Ukers calls it “the original French drip pot”. Here’s how it works and what it led to.

The short version

• Two stacked sections, with coffee on a perforated grid between them.
• Boiling water poured on top drips through into the pot below.
• A perforated spreader keeps the water from churning up the coffee.
• Paris, about 1800: tin at first, then porcelain and silver.
• Named after an archbishop, probably invented by a chemist.

How does a French drip pot work?

Ukers explains that De Belloy “employed the principle of having the boiling water drip through the ground coffee when held in suspension by a perforated metal or porcelain grid”. French Wikipedia describes the pot as two vessels stacked one on top of the other, separated by a compartment for the coffee. You pour boiling water into the top, the coffee extracts slowly and passes into the lower pot: “less an infusion than a leaching”.

1. Put ground coffee on the perforated grid in the upper section.
2. Lay the perforated water spreader on the coffee. Ukers notes the De Belloy pot had a spreader and a “plugger” to keep the coffee in place.
3. Pour boiling water into the top.
4. Let it drip through into the pot below.
5. Lift off the upper section and serve.

Brillat-Savarin added a refinement in The Physiology of Taste (1825): take the first brew, heat it back to the boil and pour it through again, for “a coffee as clear and as good as possible”.

How much coffee should I use?

Ukers quotes the American coffee trade’s 1921 advice for drip coffee: from a heaped teaspoon to a rounded tablespoon per cup, depending on the grind and the pot, using coffee “as fine as it is practical”, but large enough not to slip through the holes. The finer the grind, the less coffee you need.

Who invented it?

The pot carries the name of Jean-Baptiste de Belloy (1709–1808), archbishop of Paris. But French and German Wikipedia both credit the chemist François-Antoine-Henri Descroizilles with the invention. German Wikipedia says Descroizilles had it made by a tinsmith in Rouen, who then went to Paris, where the bishop recommended his pot; from about 1800 it was known in Paris as the cafetière du Belloy, which is why the invention was later credited to the bishop himself. French Wikipedia says the pot was also called the dubelloire or débelloire.

What did it lead to?

Ukers says the De Belloy pot was “never patented; but it appears to have furnished the inspiration for many inventors in France, England, and the United States”:

When	What	Source
About 1800	The De Belloy pot appears in Paris, first in tin, later porcelain and silver	Ukers
1806	Hadrot patents a pot with a tin-and-bismuth filter and a perforated “rammer”	Ukers
About 1806	Count Rumford’s percolator adds a hot-water jacket; published in London in 1812	Ukers
About 1817	The English biggin borrows the French drip pot’s strainer	Ukers
1819	The Neapolitan flip pot, a reversible drip pot	German Wikipedia
1878	The porcelain Karlsbad pot, a special form of the French drip pot	German Wikipedia

Ukers argues that, strictly speaking, the De Belloy pot was a true percolator, since the water drips through fine holes in china or metal, and that it predated Rumford’s famous percolator by about six years. By 1922 he reported that the French drip method was the most common in Belgium and the approved way in Holland.

General guidance only. Antique pots may be fragile or made with materials not meant for food today, so use a modern one for drinking.

French drip pot vs other methods

• Biggin: England’s drip pot, later with a cloth bag.
• Karlsbad coffee pot: the porcelain descendant with a glazed filter.
• Neapolitan flip pot: a reversible drip pot from Naples.
• Esencia de café: Peru’s drip-pot coffee essence.

Explore every gravity and metal-filter method in the gravity-metal chapter.