Q&A: Percolator
Percolator
Question
Hi Rabbi Michi,
If the percolator is set on a Sabbath timer, and on the Sabbath I put the coffee in the filter and the lukewarm water in the reservoir before the timer turns on—what is the ruling?
Answer
If you put everything in before the Sabbath, it seems to me that it is permitted. If you put the items in (the water and the coffee) on the Sabbath, that requires discussion. I do not know exactly how this device works, but I assume the water heats up on the Sabbath and the coffee gets cooked. Why are you putting the water in on the Sabbath and not before the Sabbath? Are we talking about cooked coffee, where there is no prohibition of cooking after cooking? If it is roasting, then there are decisors who hold that there is cooking after roasting. Offhand, placing it there on the Sabbath seems problematic to me, since this is bringing the cooking closer.
Discussion on Answer
Why would that be something newly created?
A new entity is created—a coffee drink—that did not exist at all before the Sabbath.
After all, before activation I had two separate components: lukewarm water and dry ground coffee; once the percolator turns on, you get a completely different beverage, both in taste and in definition (like “food that turned into a drink”). So I wondered whether one should be concerned here about something newly created / muktzeh because a new drink comes into being on the Sabbath, beyond the discussion of cooking.
More generally, you could ask this about any machine that cooks on the Sabbath. Suppose there were a machine that makes a fresh omelet on the Sabbath from eggs that were placed in it before the Sabbath—would there be some prohibition involved? Maybe something newly created?
I don’t think there is really anything new here.
What about an omelet cooked by a machine on the Sabbath? There too there is nothing new?
Good question. Maybe there is.
This is basically a steam device for brewing coffee. The coffee drips slowly into a pot, which sits on a hot surface like a hotplate. There, I presumably need to act as one would with a hotplate if I pour from it. I can return it only if I did not set it down. Or if I did set it down, but intended to return it? [I intentionally presented at the beginning of the thread the most problematic possibility out of the three I had thought of.]
And this is apparently coffee that has only been roasted—coarsely ground black coffee suited to the various machines.
By cooked coffee, I assume you mean the various kinds of instant coffee.
And what if I also follow Maimonides’ view that there is no cooking after cooking—that is of course what I mean.
Because as far as I’m concerned, just as there is no cooking after baking, so too there is none after roasting. Maybe that is relevant only to making black coffee directly from the urn in a first vessel.
Isn’t there also a prohibition of something newly created here?