Five Alternative Uses for Coffee Filters From Coffee and Tea Newsletter

I wish I could take credit for this post, but I can’t. I get the Coffee & Tea Newsletter and this was featured. Now, I was aware and have used the first tip numerous times. But the rest were new for me. They make a lot of sense.

5 Great Alternative Uses for Coffee Filters:

Strain wine from a bottle containing a broken cork—Put a filter over a carafe or decanter and pour the wine through the filter. The filter will trap any pieces of cork that were floating in the bottle.
Chip-free fine china—Use coffee filters placed between the plates and cups when you stack your good china dishes to protect them from chips and scratches.
Prevent soil from draining from flowerpots—For planting or repotting, put a coffee filter at the bottom over the drainage hole, then, add the soil. This will prevent the soil from spilling from the bottom of the pot, but permits proper water drainage.
Keep your kids clean when eating ice pops—Simply slide the wooden stick of a child’s favorite ice pop through a coffee filter and you’ll have happy and sticky-free kids!
Clean windows and glass—Use coffee filters as an emergency substitute for paper towels. They leave no lint or residue and can fit on your hand like a mitt.

About the Coffee Filter
It was more than 100 years ago, in the summer of 1908, that a German housewife named Melitta Bentz created the first paper coffee filter. She wanted to remove the bitter taste she associated with boiling loose grounds and find an alternative to the popular method of using linen to brew coffee. She thought that if she could pour boiling water over the grounds, but filter them out, the bitterness would be reduced.

The story tells of her ingenuity as she punctured holes in the bottom of a brass pot, lined it with blotting paper taken from the school books of her two sons, and thus created, in principle, the first coffee filter. The Imperial Patent Office in Berlin issued a patent to protect the invention as a utility model, and after some fine-tuning, in 1912 her now famous family started producing paper filters, and later, filter bags.

Now, more than a century later, the idea born from the vision of Melitta Bentz has morphed into a product still in use today. The company, Melitta, is now run by her grandchildren and markets coffee, filters, and machines branded with her name.

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