The moka pot was invented in the early 1930s, by Italian engineer and aluminum metalworker Alfonso Bialetti, as an easy and affordable way to make coffee at home. At the time, coffee was almost exclusively made and consumed at coffeehouses.
Bialetti’s creation, the Moka Express, is by far the most common moka pot sold today and the most recognizable. It has three main components made of cast aluminum: an octagonal base, a funnel-shaped strainer, and an angular pitcher with a hinged lid on top. The design was inspired by art deco architecture and women’s skirts in the 1930s, said Bialetti Industries export manager Cristina Leporati, and “over the years, it has undergone only minor changes in shape.”
Aluminum shortages during World War II almost doomed the Moka Express, but sales took off again when Alfonso’s son, Renato, took over the business and introduced l’Omino con i baffi (“the little man with the mustache”) as its mascot in the late 1950s. The character—whose image is based on Renato himself and is printed on the side of every Moka Express—has become just as iconic as Alfonso’s invention. (When Renato died, in 2016, his cremated remains were buried in a specially made Moka Express.) Over the years, the Moka Express has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper Hewitt in New York City, at the London Science Museum, and at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan, among others.
Unlike many other stovetop coffee makers, a moka pot employs a pressurized style of extraction. So “water boils in the lowest chamber and pushes upward through the filter in the form of steam,” said Jessie Washburn, a writer for Blue Bottle Coffee, adding that the coffee it brews is “viscous and strong.”
Although I treat the coffee I make in a moka pot much as I would espresso—adding a little milk for a faux cortado or lots of milk (and in my case, sugar) for a latte—it isn’t actually the same. Espresso can easily stand on its own, whereas moka coffee tastes better with a bit of dressing up.
“Espresso is a more intense and full-bodied drink than moka coffee,” Leporati said, adding that there’s a “syrupy-ness” to espresso that the moka pot’s extraction process can’t achieve.