Pilot

Our introduction to Gilmore Girls. Containing the seminal scene, important enough to get shown as the Netflix preview: A douchey guy passing through stars hollow makes a pass at both Lorelais. After finding out they're mother and daughter he gawps "you do not look old enough to have a daughter . . . and you do not look like a daughter". This sets up the essential premise of the show: a mum somehow young enough to be hot. A hitherto unheard-of concept in television writing.

More importantly though, what's Luke using to make coffee in the diner? Yes, that diner that's soon to be magically transformed to a different layout after the pilot. . .

The Drip Coffee Maker

A patent for the electric drip coffee machine was taken out by Gottlob Widmann in Germany in 1954, though the drip coffee process itself had been invented decades earlier in 1908 by Melitta Bentz. The story goes that her mother had always been frustrated by the difficulty of cleaning up coffee grounds from a French press. One day Bentz grabbed a page from her son's notebook, placed it on a pot. She filled the paper with ground coffee, then poured over some hot water. Thus, inventing the drip coffee maker. More than a century later, the Melitta group is now a 1.3-billion-euro yearly revenue business.

The electric drip coffee machine is a simple device. You drop your ground coffee onto a filter on the top then fill a reservoir underneath with water. You switch it on. The water will slowly heat up, then as it heats up it will boil up through a tube and drip onto the grounds.

Two brands, Bunn (the Bunn-O-Matic corporation), and Mr Coffee would bring the electric drip coffee maker to America. American diners embraced this low-labour method of coffee brewing. A haven for working class Americans, diners were designed to pump out industrial qualities of the cheapest cups of joe. At Luke's diner the chosen brand of machine for churning out these volumes of java was Bunn. In the Gilmore Girls pilot for a few short shots we can see an RL35 commercial electric drip coffee maker behind the counter.

The Bunn RL35

Armed with 5 warmers, a stainless-steel finish, and the ability to brew 28.4 litres of coffee an hour, the Bunn RL35 is a perfect mechanical representation of Luke's workhorse demeanour. The squat decanters are a familiar shape. A 1950s-chic Bunn logo hangs over the top of the central warmer. This is a machine that allows Luke to keep his early-2000s masculinity intact while also serving unhealthy quantities of coffee to Lorelai for 7.2 seasons of will-they-won't-they.