Coffee Recipe of the week: Moka Pot

This time I am gonna explore with you a recipe for a device that is extremely popular between coffee drinkers, and hugely underestimated by coffee enthusiasts. Moka Pot. Most probably you’ll find it in every house, and most probably even your grandmother can share with you her recipe.

My experience with Moka Pot started some years ago, when, after moving to Portugal, one day I simply went out and got every single coffee device that regular people use here at home. That was the day when I got a Bialetti, a very budget home Drip Machine and Nespresso – with a goal in mind. I wanted to know how to make specialty coffee taste good using simple equipment.

Moka Pot was not something extremely popular in my family when I was growing up. Ibrik, or Turkish coffee, was.

So with Bialetti I had to learn how to make it from scratch, already after I started to work in Specialty.

Here you can find my first post about Moka Pot pros and cons, written some years ago. It also contains a recipe.

The main problem with Moka Pot, or something that is pretty different and you have almost no control over, is the brewing temperature. Due to the way it works (water climbing up the tube from bottom chamber, through the coffee bed right to the upper chamber) it is impossible to use any other brewing temperature but boiling. It contributed to the device being not so popular among specialty coffee purists. For a reason or not – the question is still open.

I usually use Moka when I am going to camp, alongside with french press, because it is so easy to brew and it makes a very energy effective device, due to the fact that you are brewing AND heating up the water at the same time. I find one thing particularly cool in Moka Pot, though. It is the precision that it provides in terms of brewing ratio. When you find the recipe for your size of Moka, it becomes pretty easy to repeat it more or less consistently. You simply fill the basket and the bottom chamber till the same level (using the valve as a way to measure where you are).

Although Moka doesn’t allow almost any flexibility in terms of brewing temperature, you still can play a bit with another parameter – grind size. You can use the grind size that you us for V60, medium-coarse, or you can go finer, even close to espresso style. It all depends on your taste and what you want to get in the end. For this recipe I am using the grind size a bit finer than for V60, the same that I use to make an Aeropress.

There are other tricks that you may want to learn when starting to brew Moka

• Filling the bottom chamber with boiling water will significantly speed up the process (but it will be trickier for you to put the upper part, cause the device will be…HOT)
• Cooling down the Moka Pot under cold water or wrapping it in a dump towel right after brewing (I don’t do it right after though, I just serve the coffee right away, and cool the device under cold water to disassemble and clean)
• Using Aeropress filter (upper chamber filter mesh) to clean up the brew from the sediment (kinda cool if you like cleaner brews, I am not a big fan cause I try not to use paper filter when I can)

HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED FOR THE RECIPE:

• 20 grams of coffee (natural coffee from Guatemala, Fraijanes region, roasted by me a week ago)
• 255 grams of water (portuguese tap water, filtered by Peak Water from 200ppm to 105 ppm)
• grind size – 13A at Baratza Sette, filter burrs
• Moka Pot
• optional: aeropress paper filter