Three hundred years of coffee culture passed until an enterprising young woman changed the way in which coffee was made.... developing a method now adopted in most countries around the world. In 1908, Melitta Bentz, a housewife from Dresden, had this revolutionary idea. Why not use paper to filter out unwanted residues? So she punctured the bottom of a brass pot and lined it with blotting paper taken from the notebook of her oldest son. Perfectly filtered coffee -- without bitterness and grounds -- dripped out of the bottom.