Coffee is the original office biohack and the nation’s most popular productivity tool. As we lose sleep to the changeover to daylight saving time, the caffeine-addicted WIRED Reviews team is writing about our favorite coffee brewing routines and devices that’ll keep us alert and maybe even happy in the morning. Today, operations manager Scott Gilbertson expounds on the perfect simplicity of the moka pot. In the days after, we’ll add other Java.Base stories about other WIRED writers’ favorite brewing methods.
Years of travel and a love of repair has given me a special appreciation for simple devices. A pen and paper is still the simplest way to write. A cast-iron pan is the simplest way to cook. And a moka pot is the simplest way to brew coffee.
What I love about the moka pot isn’t just the results I get from it. I do love the flavor, especially when paired with a nice dark, chocolatey, smokey roast, but the moka pot is about more than flavor. It’s also about ingenious simplicity and a design that has lasted nearly a century.
Simple Beginning
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
The moka pot’s exact origins depend on who you ask, but it was first manufactured and popularized by an aluminum manufacturer named Alfonso Bialetti and his son Renato, who started mass-producing them the same year. Today, Bialetti Industries still makes the Moka Express. The iconic logo image of a short, squat, heavily mustached man is indeed based on Bialetti himself.
If you want some idea of Renato Bialetti’s commitment to the device that made him famous, consider that when he died in 2022, his ashes were interred in a large moka pot. He isn’t the only one who revered the design. The moka pot is featured in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art. Its iconic octagonal shape makes it one of the most recognized coffee brewers in the world.
The moka pot is a pressure-driven stovetop (or campfire top, though this requires close attention) coffee brewer that works something like a percolator. The Moka Express consist of four parts, split into two chambers. The bottom is the water reservoir which heats up on the stove. Into this, you put the brewing basket which holds your grounds. The top consists of a long tube in the center of a holding chamber. On the bottom of the top piece, there’s a metal filter ringed by a rubber (or silicone on some models) gasket. The top and bottom screw together.
As the water heats it passes upwards, through the basket of grounds, and eventually out of the tube. The extraction sits above the grounds and the metal filter keeps everything in place. It’s ingeniously simple.
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