The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way

I am sure that many an Open Cul­ture read­er has a Bialet­ti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew lit­tle about its his­to­ry and appar­ent­ly even less about how to prop­er­ly use one. Cof­fee expert and author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee James Hoff­mann intro­duces us to the appli­ance we think we know in the above video.

Alfon­so Bialet­ti didn’t orig­i­nal­ly get into the cof­fee busi­ness. In 1919, the Bialet­ti com­pa­ny was an alu­minum man­u­fac­tur­er, with the Moka Express invent­ed some­where around 1933 by Lui­gi de Pon­ti, who worked for the com­pa­ny. Accord­ing to Decon­struct­ing Prod­uct Design by William Lid­well and Ger­ry Man­casa, the inspi­ra­tion came from Bialetti’s wife’s old-fash­ioned wash­ing machine: “a fire, a buck­et, and a lid with a tube com­ing out of it. The buck­et was filled with soapy water, sealed with the lid, and then brought to a boil over the fire, at which point the vapor­ized soapy water was pushed up through the tube and expelled on to the laun­dry.”

As Hoff­mann shows, ear­li­er cof­fee-mak­ers did use steam and a drip tech­nique, but the Moka Express was the first all-in-one mak­er that could sit on the stove top and do the work. All the user has to lis­ten for was the tell-tale gur­gle when it fin­ish­es brew­ing.

In 1945, Alfonso’s son Rena­to returned from a pris­on­er-of-war camp and took over the fam­i­ly busi­ness. He was instru­men­tal in focus­ing on the Moka Express and turn­ing it into an inter­na­tion­al cof­fee brand. He hired car­toon­ist Paul Cam­pani to design l’omino coi baf­fi, “the mus­ta­chioed lit­tle man” whose image is on the side of every Moka Express, and dur­ing the 1950s was in a series of humor­ous ani­mat­ed com­mer­cials. Bialet­ti was the pride of Italy, and for Ital­ian immi­grants liv­ing abroad, it was a trea­sured object in the kitchen.

Such was the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of Rena­to Bialet­ti with the Moka Express that when he died in 2016, his ash­es were interred in a giant repli­ca pot. Hoff­mann details the fate of the com­pa­ny after­wards, how it has fared against com­peti­tors in Italy and out­side. Will it still be around in decades? Who knows. But it does make a great cup of cof­fee.

And he shows the cor­rect way to brew a cup with the Moka Express in this oth­er video. Here’s a few things I was doing wrong: not using hot water in the bot­tom to start; try­ing to pack in the ground cof­fee like I was mak­ing an espres­so. (Note: a Moka Express cof­fee is some­where between an espres­so and a pour-over.) Using too fine a grind; and not cool­ing the bot­tom as soon as it’s done work­ing its mag­ic. (All these tips I’m going to try tomor­row morn­ing.) Maybe you have been mak­ing your Bialet­ti cup the right way all along. Let me know in the com­ments. I’ll read them over a fresh­ly brewed cup.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Life and Death of an Espres­so Shot in Super Slow Motion

How to Make the World’s Small­est Cup of Cof­fee, from Just One Cof­fee Bean

The Birth of Espres­so: How the Cof­fee Shots The Fuel Our Mod­ern Life Were Invent­ed

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.