How make Navy coffee: 1. Find a 30 gal percolator. 2. Fill basket with five pounds of ground, preferably coffee ground, but whatever. 3. Boil for 6-8 hours. If you get a solid rope of coffee out of the spout it's ready. Chew on that for your watch, but no more than 8 hours at once. At end of watch spit that back into the percolator, other squids are waiting. Do NOT toss coffee overboard. It has been known to crawl up onto shore and attack small children and dogs.
On Peleliu I spent 47 hours standing in the bilges getting a vital piece of equipment working. They fed me lots of coffee and I didn't sleep for another 48 hours. The pecker-checkers were ready to dart me.
I got up at 0400, a very long time ago, went over into the galley by 0430 and the first thing I did was make the coffee. But to tell you the truth, all I remember is the big stainless urn. That’s it. Like I said, a long time ago. All I can tell you is that it was good coffee, served about 300 for breakfast and no complaints, at least none that I remember, a very long time ago. After that eggs to order, bacon or sausage, shit on a shingle, breakfast pastries, cold cereal, hash browns, toast and juices. That’s all. Oh, maybe something I forgot. I started the soup for the day.
Sliders and rollers. The ubiquitous "mystery meat". Box after box of meat loaded on board, each marked "USAF REJECTED."
My wife was an Air Force brat but I swear she has Navy tendencies. Try to stir her coffee is akin to mixing cement. Although one or two cups lasts me all day!
Aboard the Enterprise, there was one variant called "4 RAR coffee" (RAR = Reactor Auxiliaries Room). The ET's had taken a standard Navy coffee percolator, One that looks more or less like that one and had wrapped it in copper tubing over the whole length. They would fill the hopper packed completely full of coffee and then make it in the normal way. When finished, they'd turn the unit off, and pump liquid nitrogen through the coil until the coffee inside was back to or below room temperature. Then, the process was repeated one or more times with fresh grounds.
Steam powered Navy would just run a coil around the pot and add grounds when the output got too liquid.
I recall getting up around 0300 for the morning watch and going to the wardroom for a cup from the pot that had been keeping warm since midrats. On the old Albany, a bridge watch started with going down four decks to CIC and then twelve decks up to the bridge - strong coffee was quite welcome!
We had a saying "If you can pass out and fall face first onto the steel deck plates and not spill your coffee you're ready to take the E-7 exam."
