Stop Fighting Your Moka Pot

A few of you guys have asked me about moka pots over the last while, usually with a slightly wounded expression, and it’s always the same question. Why does mine taste so bad. So here goes, an entire post about the little aluminium octagon.

Nearly everyone owns one. It lives at the back of a cupboard behind the salad spinner you’ve used twice, and it comes out when the good machine is sulking, or when you’re away somewhere with a stove and not much else. And a lot of people who own one have long since decided it makes bitter, angry coffee and that this is simply what a moka pot does.

It doesn’t. Don’t chuck yours out just yet.

Upfront though, I’m not a moka obsessive and I won’t pretend to be. I’ve got a home espresso machine and that’s where most of my mornings start (I roast the stuff for a living, so yes, I’m precious about it). But I’ve messed about with a moka plenty on holidays and camping-ish weekends where the good kit stays home, and I’ve landed somewhere fairly simple: it makes really good coffee, as long as you stop asking it to be something else.

It was never espresso

The name does most of the damage here. These get sold as “stovetop espresso makers”, so you buy one with a picture in your head of a thick syrupy shot with crema on top, and then you’re disappointed for the rest of your natural life.

A moka pushes water through the coffee at roughly 1 to 1.5 bar. A proper espresso machine does about 9. So, six times harder, give or take. (I got into where that 9 bar actually comes from in the home espresso post, if you’re that way inclined.)

What you get instead is a strong, concentrated, punchy cup sitting somewhere between an espresso and a very serious filter coffee. Add hot milk and you’ve got a properly respectable stovetop… something. I’ve never known what to call it. Italian homes have been drinking it since the 1930s and they seem to be coping.

FYI: the classic Bialetti Moka Express goes back to 1933, and the story goes that Alfonso Bialetti pinched the idea off an early washing machine that pushed soapy water up through a central tube. So the design sitting on millions of stoves is basically borrowed laundry tech. I find that far more charming than I probably should.

Why it goes bitter

Bitter moka coffee is nearly always overcooking. Two things do most of the damage: grind that’s too fine, and too much heat for too long.

Grind first, because it’s always grind first. Aim for something like fine table sugar. Coarser than espresso, finer than what you’d chuck in a French press. Espresso-fine grounds choke the thing completely, the water has to fight its way through, everything sits in contact far too long, and you get that scorched ashy edge that made you cross with the pot in the first place. If your brew is crawling and tasting harsh, go coarser. That’s usually the whole fix.

I squawk about grind in nearly every post and I’m aware of it, you’re welcome to start a drinking game. But it is the biggest lever in almost every brewing method, and I learned that on a secondhand Wega packet grinder we ran in the early days of Apothecary, sitting on the floor next to some office chairs, very glamorous. I got more out of fiddling with that dial than from any expensive thing I’ve owned since.

Then heat. A moka runs hot and pushes hard, so it’s rough on stale beans and there’s nowhere for them to hide. Coffee roasted recently and ground just before you brew will do more for your cup than any gadget you can buy. (Water matters more than people think too, but that’s a whole other post, and I will get to it eventually.)

The hot water trick

This one changed my results more than anything else and I can’t take the credit for it. James Hoffmann, more or less the patron saint of coffee YouTube, makes the case for starting with hot water instead of cold, and it holds up in the cup.

Fill the base with water just off the boil, up to just under the little safety valve, then put it on the heat.

The logic is quite satisfying if you like knowing why things work, which I do, being a scientist of sorts. With cold water the whole pot climbs to temperature slowly with the grounds sitting in there the entire time, gently stewing. Hot water gets the brew moving quickly, so the coffee spends far less time getting roasted a second time on your stove. Which, seeing as I already roasted it once, on purpose, with a thermometer, feels a bit rude.

Obviously the base gets hot fast when you do this. Screw it together with a cloth and mind your fingers, don’t be a hero.

Then don’t wander off

Medium-low heat. Lid up so you can see what’s happening.

As the coffee rises it should look like warm honey, a steady dark stream. The moment it starts spluttering and gurgling and going blond, it’s finished, so take it off the heat right then. Plenty of people run the base under a cold tap to stop it dead and that works fine.

That final gurgle is steam blasting through the spent grounds and dragging all the harsh stuff up with it, so pull it early and you keep the sweeter part.

This is the step everyone skips because it’s the boring one. You have to actually stand there. I stand over my roaster like a meerkat for the same reason, so I’m hardly going to pretend it’s beneath me.

What beans, though

People ask me this constantly and I don’t think there’s one right answer, but here’s roughly where I land.

A moka flatters a medium to medium-dark roast. Chocolate, nuts, brown sugar, that family. The pressure and the heat push hard, and a big fruity light roast can come out sharp and a bit shouty in there, in a way it wouldn’t in a V60.

That said, I’d rather you brewed a fresh light roast in a moka than a stale dark one, every time. Freshness beats roast level. If a bag only has a “best before” date and no roasted-on date, put it down and walk away, and I say that with love.

The soap argument

Somebody will tell you never to wash a moka pot with soap, because the oils build up and season it like a cast iron pan. Somebody else will tell you that’s how you end up drinking coffee flavoured with 2019.

I’m firmly in the second camp. Old coffee oils go rancid, that’s just what fats do, and rancid is a flavour you can taste. Rinse it properly with hot water, dry it, and give it a gentle wash when it needs one. Your pot is not a sourdough starter.

Do check the rubber gasket every so often too. They go hard and shrink, the seal gets lazy, and then you’re blaming your beans for what is basically a two-rand rubber ring.

What to actually do with the cup

Right, so a moka cup is strong. “Why is my heart doing that” strong, if you drink it neat and you aren’t used to it.

Treat it like the concentrate it basically is. I usually cut mine with a splash of hot water, which gets you a stovetop americano (some people call it a moka americano, I call it the one I make when I’ve clearly already had enough espresso). Or top it with hot milk for something in cappuccino territory. On a slow holiday morning, that one, in the biggest mug in the house, is honestly hard to beat.

What I wouldn’t do is drown it. The punchy concentrated thing is the good bit, so add just enough to make it drinkable and then stop.

And if you take sugar in it, take sugar in it. A moka handles sugar far better than a delicate pour-over ever will, and I’m not going to tell anyone.

So if your moka has been letting you down, it’s probably not you and it’s probably not the pot. Too fine a grind, tired beans, or the heat cranked too high for too long, usually one of those, often all three holding hands.

Sort them out and the cheap little octagon you were about to exile to the back of the drawer will make you a properly good cup. It won’t be espresso. Nobody promised you espresso except the box it came in. But on a slow Sunday, or on a stove somewhere in the middle of nowhere with the good machine three hundred kays away, it’s hard to beat. 🙂

If you want beans that can take that kind of heat, our single origins and blends are roasted to order here in Blouberg, and we put most of what we’re up to on Instagram. Come say hi.