How to use an Italian stovetop coffee pot

You will find a moka in every Italian kitchen. They're a design icon, part of Italian life, and a perfect souvenir. Here's all there is to know about their history and how to use them.

If you’ve ever stayed in an Italian home, or are staying in self-catering accommodation during your visit, you will have noticed a timeless classic with pride of place in every kitchen: the octagonal mini stovetop coffee pot, or moka as it is known in Italian.

No Italian house is without at least one moka, usually several, and they also accompany Italians worldwide: if you stop any Italian tourist abroad and search their suitcase, you’ll almost certainly find one stashed in their luggage.

Celebrating their 90th birthday in 2023, they’re a perfect example of classic Italian design: similar to the Olivetti typewriter, or the classic Fiat 500, mokas are almost entirely functional; yet that functionality is contained within a compact, eccentric, iconic shape that is instantly recognisable.

Mokas are inexpensive, small and light, and so they make great souvenirs and gifts.

In this article we tell you how to use one, learn their celebrated history, and how to care for them to get the best performance – and coffee – out of them over many years.

What is a moka?

While stovetop percolating coffee pots have existed since the middle of the 19th century, the efficient design of the moka, its lightness and inexpensiveness, and the purity of the coffee it makes, caused it to dominate the market almost the moment it was released.

A standard moka comprises an aluminum water boiling base, a filter percolator, a filter gasket, and a coffee collection jug at the top.

The base is filled with water, the filter percolator inserted and loaded with coffee grounds, the lid is screwed on, then the machine is heated on the stove. The water is turned into steam, which forces it up the spout into the filter unit and through the coffee, stripping the grounds of their delicious oils, before continuing upwards to the top of the central pipe and then condensing and pouring or dripping down the spigot into the chamber at the top.

Parts of the moka

How to make coffee in a moka

There are a lot of pretentious sites out there that try to turn the use of a moka into some sort of arcane science involving scales, pre-heated water, etc. Honestly it’s not that complex; believe us when we tell you that any normal Italian would laugh you out of the house for suggesting it’s a fine art and needs measuring devices.

However, to get the best out of using a moka, there are a few key principles that you do need to adopt, and a few things to avoid.

Fill level marked by line.
Fill the base water tank with cold water, but do not overfill: the water should come to just UNDER the safety valve. Why? Because should the valve be activated in the event of a blockage, it will emit whatever’s next to it. If that’s water, you’ll get a stream of boiling water spraying across the kitchen. If it’s steam then you will get steam pouring out – still dangerous, but not as messy.
Once the water jug is filled to the correct level, drop in the filter piece.
Fill the filter with coffee grounds. DO NOT COMPRESS THEM like you would with an espresso machine. It’s very important for them to be loose. Too tight and they will form an impenetrable ‘hockey puck’ which can lead to overpressurisation of the machine and discharge from the safety valve, or worse, a dramatic and dangerous explosion of boiling water and coffee grounds (ask me how I know…). The grounds should be heaped up in a little ‘mountain’ slightly above the level of the filter piece, a feat usually performed with a teaspoon.
Now place the jug over the top of the grounds and gently screw it in to place, making sure not to cross-thread the aluminum grooves. Once it’s screwed down, give it an extra tightening twist to ensure the gasket seals properly.
Place on a gas or electric stovetop on a medium heat. Make sure not to put the plastic handle over the flame/hotplate: most Italian househoulds have at least one moka that suffered this fate, condemned to a cupboard with a melted or entirely burned-off handle. And the smell of burning bakelite…
Wait and listen. The unit will be silent at first, but after a few minutes you’ll hear the water start to boil and the steam to whoosh upwards through the coffee. Most people will lift the lid of the coffee jug to check the level (be careful – use a cloth) and will see and hear when their coffee is ready because only a few drips of condensed steam appear with a gurgle at the top of the spigot every couple of seconds.
Take it off the heat immediately! Because the entire unit is aluminum, it tends to heat up very quickly when the base jug is empty, and this can not only boil your coffee, making it unpalatable, but also cause the entire moka to become red hot or even – worst case scenario – melt.
Pour immediately and drink. A regular-sized moka provides just one small espresso cup, through larger versions are available. Enhance it with a drop of milk (make it macchiato) and half a teaspoon of cane sugar. Buongusto!

How to care for a moka

A few Italian traditions exist around the moka, and we are not ones to question them.

Never use a new moka to make coffee until you’ve seasoned it. Most households will take a brand-new moka, first boil water through it, and then make (and throw away) five or six rounds of coffee. This supposedly removes the metallic taste, and any aluminum swarf that may still be inside it.
Never wash a moka with soap, or put it in the dishwasher. Rinse it and brush the grounds out only, then leave it to dry, dismantled. This builds up a dark brown patina of coffee oils (as seen in our illustrations) that contribute to the unique taste of the moka – the older they are, the richer the flavor.
Make sure the gasket is totally free of coffee grounds before you make the next cup. If not, they will break the seal around the top unit, causing your coffee to leak out before it gets caught in the jug.

What coffee should I get for my moka when in Rome?

Obviously the best coffee will be that which is freshly roasted to your taste, and freshly ground. But if you don’t have a grinder, or are back in your own country, any Italian brand of ground coffee will give great results: Lavazza Qualità Rossa, for example, makes a decent cup.

The key to getting fresh-roast coffee in Rome is to look for the word torrefazione. This means ‘coffee roasting’ and indicates that it’s done on the premises. There are a few big names in the city to buy beans from, or to have them grind the beans on the premises while you wait.

Sant’Eustachio il Caffè is the most famous coffee shop in the city. It has a particularly tasty secret recipe, and trades on its reputation: high prices and surly service, but we grudgingly admit that it’s worth it. Here, as well as coffee and pastries, you can buy their house-blend beans, ground coffee, chocolate-coated coffee beans, cups, mugs, tchotchkes, and even their own brand of bright yellow mokas.
Across the piazza is Tazza d’Oro. This place is less fancy than its competitor but many say it has better coffee. It certainly has nicer coffee cups – the thick, neapolitan style that retain the heat of the coffee. Many varieties of coffee are available, including their signature blend.
You will find branches of the Castroni deli all over the city. This is a specialist food and wine shop where in addition to high quality Italian delicacies, expats and immigrants gratefully find favorites from home such as Betty Crocker cake mix and Marmite – albeit sold at a huge premium. But Castroni started life in 1932 – the year before the invention of the moka – as a coffee shop, and their torrefazione is truly excellent. They sell some single-country varieties such as Colombia and Cuba, as well as pure robusta and arabica beans, as well as their miscela bar blend, which is particularly good served from a moka.
Finally if you’re looking for third-wave coffees, you will have to make a short detour to Piazza Fiume where you’ll find Faro – Luminaries of Coffee. This hipster outfit is one of the city’s only places that specialize in obscure and single grower varietals, and they take it very seriously indeed, with a commitment to sustainability. The prices are high but the quality is second to none.

Moka accessories

Replacement gaskets

If your coffee leaks out the machine from the middle, your gasket may be broken. These are easily replaced. Every supermarket in Italy sells a selection of moka accessories – and some have a huge selection! When buying your moka we suggest buying a few replacement gasket filter units at the same time to ensure you get years or even decades of use out of it.

I have an induction stove… help?

Because the moka is made of aluminum, induction stoves do not work for them. But all is not lost! Bialetti make a steel induction hotplate that you can use to stimulate heat, and then rest your moka on top. Any flatt-ish pan or griddle will do the job too.

When I look to see if my coffee is ready, coffee sprays all over the place

You need a spigot cover – a paraspruzzi or spray guard. These tiny metal caps sit over the end of the spigot and stop the last steamy drips of coffee from spraying out horizontally, forcing it down into the coffee jug.

My moka is too small for my gas stove

In every supermarket or casalinghi (housewares store) across the land you will find small, crucifom rings of metal that are designed to fill the gaps in the stove top and lovingly cradle a moka in place without it toppling over and spilling its boiling contents everywhere – an occasional hazard when using a moka.

The history of the moka

By the early part of the 20th century, stovetop coffee percolators were already common, but they were clumsy and heavy, and relied on mechanisms such as the inversion of the entire pot to drip hot water through an inadequate filter, resulting in burned-tasting, gritty coffee.

One day in the early 1930s an engineer in Piemonte called Alfonso Bialetti, was observing his wife washing the household clothing using a contraption called a lessiveuse: a metal bucket with a pipe running up from a boiler in its base, that was designed to be placed on a heat source. The water would boil, be forced up the pipe, and would squirt out of the top of the pipe onto the clothes.

Bialetti had the sudden inspiration that a smaller version of a lessiveuse could be used to percolate coffee instead. He had worked in an aluminum smelting plant in France in his youth, and he realised that with this light, conductive metal he could make an ultimately portable, inexpensive, and efficient percolator.

He set about patenting his idea, and the moka was born. Bialetti originally sold his inventions personally using the slogan “Il caffè come quello del bar” (coffee like you get in the bar) but eventually his success was so great that the Bialetti company became an industrial giant, and Alfonso’s surname eventually became more associated with the company than the man.

Few other Italian inventions have had quite such an impact on society. They saved time and a lot of money for working people, allowing them to make an express coffee for breakfast at home rather than paying a few lire to drink one on someone else’s premises, and soon every house in the land had at least one Bialetti (or an imitation product) in the kitchen, and the machine eventually became part of the fabric of Italian life.

The Bialetti company, despite the constant threat of bankruptcy in the 21st century – brought on by over-expansion just before the financial crisis – is still the primary manufacturer of mokas in Italy, and there is a chain of stores across Rome where you can buy the originals, emblazoned with a cartoon of Alfonso’s son Renato Bialietti – “the man with the moustache” – who helped grow the brand to dizzying heights in the 1960s and 1970s.

It is fitting, therefore, that when Renato died in 2016, his ashes were interred in a giant moka pot. An eccentric but entirely appropriate celebration of an Italian icon.