I like to make coffee one cup at a time. I heat a pyrex cup of
water nearly to a boil, throw in a tablespoon of coffee, stir, let
it steep, and pour it through a fine plastic filter into my
drinking cup.

My aunt prefers an electric percolator. She brought me her
48-ounce model to evaluate. Lately she has been using a smaller
one. When she tried the big one, she found it wasn't brewing good
coffee.

I used 24 ounces of water and three tablespoons of coffee. Perking
took 4-1/2 minutes. Then I put the grounds in half a cup of water,
boiled it, poured it through a filter, and drank it. That
convinced me that the perking had already removed most of the flavor.

The coffee in the pot was reasonably dark, but it wasn't as
flavorful as I'm used to. It's been so long since I've drunk
perked coffee that for all I know *all* perked coffee tastes like
this, but my aunt says it's inferior to the coffee from her other
percolator.

What could be wrong? Can a defective percolator destroy much of
the flavor as it perks?