Moka pot is the best way to prepare coffee (2026)

Coffee is Biohack is the original desktop and the country’s most popular productivity tool. While we’re losing sleep over the switch to daylight saving time, we’re addicted to caffeine Wired Our reviews team writes about our favorite coffee brewing routines and appliances that will keep us alert and maybe even happy in the morning. Today, COO Scott Gilbertson explains the quintessential simplicity of the Moka Pot. In the following days, we will add more Java.Base stories about others Wired The writers’ favorite brewing methods.

Years of travel This love of tinkering has given me a special appreciation for simple appliances. Pen and paper is still the simplest way to write. A cast iron skillet is the simplest way to cook. The moka pot is the simplest way to prepare coffee.

What I love about the moka pot isn’t just the results I get from it. I love the flavor, especially when combined with a nice dark, chocolatey, smoky flavour, but the Moka Pot is more than just the flavor. It’s also about ingenious simplicity and design that has endured for nearly a century.

Simple start

Photo: Scott Gilbertson

The exact origins of the moka pot depend on who you ask, but it was first manufactured and popularized by an aluminum manufacturing company called Alfonso Bialetti and his son Renato, who began mass producing it that same year. Today, Bialetti Industries still makes the Moka Express. The logo’s iconic image of a short, squat man with a bushy mustache is actually based on Bialetti himself.

If you want an idea of ​​Renato Bialetti’s commitment to the device that made him famous, consider that when he died in 2022, his ashes were buried in a large moka pot. He’s not the only one who reveres design. The moka pot is displayed in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art. Its iconic octagonal shape makes it one of the most popular coffee makers in the world.

A moka pot is a pressure cooker (or campfire surface, although this requires close attention) coffee maker that acts like a coffee percolator. Moka Express consists of four parts, divided into two rooms. The bottom is the water tank that is heated on the stove. In this, you can place the brewing basket that holds your coffee. The upper part consists of a long tube in the center of the holding chamber. At the bottom of the top piece is a metal filter surrounded by a rubber (or silicone in some models) gasket. Screw the upper and lower together.

When the water heats up, it passes up, through the coffee basket, and eventually out of the pipe. The extraction is placed above ground and the metal filter keeps everything in place. It’s brilliantly simple.