Having raced down to Port Edward to a couple of friends’ holiday house, without too much planning, both of us severe coffee addicts, we arrived to find that, even though we’d taken a coffee mill and the coffee itself, there wasn’t any way of making it. The local supermarket had nothing like that though we bought coffee filter papers there, 80 of them. A wild idea of putting them in coffee cups as individual filters fell apart, actually within the coffee cups or within jugs, the filter papers bursting at the bottom seam.
The filters needed to be perfectly upright and supported, as within a coffee machine. After some trials and pretty much the same number of errors, we semi-perfected a real contraption. It involved a saucepan balancing a colander upon it, around which eight pegs supported four wooden spoons which in turn supported a coffee filter with enough coffee grounds to make two cups at a time. Boiling water was carefully poured, not unlike the pour-over system we said hopefully, until the saucepan received enough coffee through the colander holes to drink.