- Today we're talking about the moka pot.
This is The Ultimate Moka Pot Technique,
and this is going to be a little bit different
to my other Ultimate Technique videos,
because, well, there is no one moka pot.
They go from being great big things
down to being nice and little and small,
there's different styles,
but they all kind of work the same way.
But it's a versatile brewer, it's a tricky brewer,
and what I'm going to do today is give you some constants,
a few things that I would do for every single brew,
and then a few variables to tweak
to get the best out of each of these brews.
If you watch this and just do the constants,
I think you'll get a better brew,
but I would recommend taking the time to understand
how to get the very best you can from the moka pot.
Let's begin, though, with a very quick explanation
of how a moka pot works.
For this we took a moka pot like this and sliced it in half,
and you can see there's really three chambers
to pay attention to.
The lowest chamber is your boiler.
You put your water in here
and as you boil the whole unit, once it's sealed together,
the steam and expanding air
will press the water up the funnel
through into the middle section
which is where the coffee sits.
And that pressure built by the steam
and built by the expanding air
will press the very hot water
through the coffee into this chamber,
filter it out, and then push the liquid up here
and into our collection receptacle in the top
from which we can then pour and drink.
It's a beautifully simple brewer.
It's kind of fun that it kinda brews upside down;
instead of water on top,
coffee and then drink at the bottom,
it goes the other way.
The big challenge with a moka pot
is preventing the whole thing getting too hot
and having incredibly hot water from the boiler
pass through the coffee,
which tends to give a great deal of bitterness to a cup.
That's what we want to avoid.
So now I'll take a classic pot,
this is a six-cup aluminum Bialetti,
and I'll walk you through the constants first
and then we'll brew with it afterwards
to go through the variables in a bit more detail.
First constant is put boiling water
in the base of this unit.
Putting boiling water in the base of this thing
brings the temperature down to the kind of low 90s,
which is perfect for putting on the heat
and starting to brew with.
You can, if you want to, boil your water in the base first,
but do let it cool down a little bit.
I wouldn't recommend starting
with the water super close to boiling point.
Starting with freshly boiled water in the base
means you have a faster brew,
more suitable brew temperatures,
And I know that sounds surprising,
but trust me, it works better this way,
and you'll get a better extracted,
more delicious cup of coffee.
Constant number two, you want a full basket of coffee.
Now most of these brewers
work on approximately a 10 to 1 ratio.
If you fill the water on a boiler to just below the valve,
typically it will hold around 10 times more water by weight
than you can fit coffee in the basket.
Bear in mind though
that filling the basket is a volumetric fill
and a light roast will weigh more than a dark roast will.
So it's difficult to say you must use exactly 10 to 1,
but I tend to recommend that as a good starting point.
This holds just under 300 grams of liquid in the base,
but I'm still gonna aim
for about 30 grams of coffee into here,
ground freshly, right before we brew.
Next up is puck prep, and consider this an optional extra.
I think it does help make the coffee taste better,
but don't freak out if this isn't an option for you.
Firstly, once your coffee is in the basket,
feel free to give it a little tap to settle it down.
If you have a needle distribution tool for espresso,
this is a great time to use it.
It helps distribute the coffee in the basket
and also get rid of any potential clumps
that might be there.
Feel free to give it another little tap
after you've settled.
The other extra is one of these,
it's an AeroPress paper filter.
In a 3-cup unit and bigger,
you can get an AeroPress filter just here
underneath the top part of the section.
This will add another layer of filtration
alongside the metal piece here
which gives you a cleaner cup
and also it seems a slightly better extraction overall.
With the slightly larger units,
I'd recommend choosing a little water to wet the filter,
not to rinse it for paper taste,
but to help it stick in place
so it doesn't move around when you're prepping your pot.
And the last constant for brewing
is avoid the hot sputtering phase at the end of brewing.
When you brew, keep your lid open
and keep an ear and an eye out on your brew.
A watched pot is a good pot in this situation.
At the end of a brew,
we definitely want to avoid uncondensed steam
passing from the boiler right through the coffee,
causing an angry spurting, sputtering phase.
If that happens,
it's making your coffee taste very bitter,
and at that point you want to rinse the pot
under the cold tap to cool it down immediately
and to stop brewing
before it adds too much bitterness to the cup.
These constants I think will make any brew better,
but we can take it even further.
Let me walk you through a brew
of a particular coffee from start to finish
and give you the additional variables
that you need to worry about.
So of course the biggest variable you are gonna use
is gonna be the coffee that you choose to brew.
Here I'm brewing a relatively light-roasted coffee
that is roasted for espresso,
but is still on the lighter end of things.
That's gonna dictate a couple of key things.
Firstly, how fine I grind the coffee.
The lighter the roast,
the finer you'll need to grind it
to get a good extraction from it.
Lighter roasts are harder to properly extract
than darker roasts.
Here I'll be finer than filter coffee,
but certainly not close to espresso.
Good bit coarser than espresso,
but finer than you might want to brew a one-cup V60.
If you brewing a pretty fine AeroPress,
you're kind of getting in the ballpark
for a brew of this size.
Secondly, it's gonna determine how full my boiler is.
Now in some situations
I want to fill the boiler a little bit less.
A less-filled boiler will brew a little earlier
and will have a lower overall brew temperature.
So if I was brewing a darker roast,
I might only fill this boiler
two thirds to three quarters of the way full.
But with a lighter roast,
I need all the water I can get
to properly extract the flavors
from this lighter-roasted coffee.
Therefore, I'm gonna fill this
right up until the base of the safety valve.
This technique is aiming to get
as much water as possible through the coffee
before it starts to sputter and get angry.
If you do that well,
you can really beautifully extract
pretty light-roasted coffees and have a very tasty cup.
With a darker roast it can be advantageous
to have less water in the boiler below,
not just from a brew temperature perspective,
but it will stop you brewing that little bit earlier.
Your end cup will be stronger, thicker, richer,
but that's often what people want from a darker roast,
just with less of that harsh bitterness
at the back of your throat.
Freshly boiled water into the base, coffee in,
and then you're gonna need a towel
just to hold the base as you screw it together.
Now this is where things get a little bit more complicated,
and this is really key to the whole technique.
When we heat this pot,
we want to generate enough heat in the boiler
to create steam pressure
to press that hot water through the coffee.
What we don't want to do is keep heating that pot
to the point that there's loads of pressure,
the water gets really hot
and the whole thing overheats and tastes bad.
So what we're gonna look to do
is heat the pot until liquid begins to flow through coffee
and then try and maintain that pressure,
not increase it much at all from that point onwards.
So here, on this gas,
I've got a little adapter plate here
to keep this thing nice and safe,
which will have an impact,
I'm gonna put a relatively low flame on it.
And I would recommend that for most heating situations.
With an electric hob,
I would recommend preheating the hob
before you even think about making coffee,
otherwise you'd be waiting a very long time,
but with gas, with induction, with an adaptor plate,
I would go for a relatively low heat,
certainly below half power.
Heating the water gently is key to the technique.
I've seen people have some success
by putting the pot in a frying pan
to help buffer the heat from the flame.
That's just a little bit wasteful
'cause you are really heating
a lot of excess metal to heat a pot,
not a truly efficient affair, but it kind of works,
and so I quite like adapter plates like this
for gas and induction.
As soon as it's on the heat,
I'd recommend opening the lid
so you can see what's happening.
We're gonna pay a lot of attention
to the liquid coming out of the pot,
because as soon as liquid appears,
we wanna essentially reduce the heat
as much as it's possible
without causing the whole thing to lose temperature
and the brew to stall.
So in this case when liquid starts to flow,
I'm gonna turn off the gas
knowing that my adapter plate is still very hot
and adding heat into the system.
If I was on an electric hob
I might move my pot just to the side,
'cause it does stay hot for quite a long time afterwards.
And on gas, if I'm on a direct flame,
I'd wanna run as low as I possibly could.
Same with induction, with an induction-friendly pot,
you wanna run as low as is possible
once liquid starts to flow.
If that liquid flow increases in speed,
I'd temporarily remove the pot from the flame.
If it slows down and seems to stall,
I'd wanna add a little bit more heat in again.
With the adapter plate it's kind of easy
because I can just turn off the heat,
and generally speaking,
the plate will supply enough heat for the rest of the brew.
But we'll measure the brew at the end in a simple way
to see how successful we've been,
and we'll know then how to tweak and improve our recipe
for the next brew.
I've now cut the heat and I'm just gonna watch this flow.
If it starts to pick up a little bit too much,
I may remove it from the heat entirely,
but right now it's looking nice
and steady and even and that's good.
And I'm just watching and waiting
for that sputtering sound
which will mean we really have to stop,
this pot's too hot.
A quick shout out to The Wired Gourmet's channel,
his video on moka pots I think was really useful
and kind of pioneered this technique
of temperature surfing the pot
to get as much liquid through as you can.
The pot's pretty close to done.
We've started to get some sputtering, time to stop.
(pot lid closing)
Now as soon as you've brewed,
you want this liquid out of the pot.
The pot was very hot, especially the aluminium ones,
and that doesn't necessarily make the coffee taste better.
What we're also gonna do is weigh how much liquid we got,
that's actually really useful.
So in this case, we got about 200 grams out.
That's a really high yield for a pot here
where we got maybe 280 grams of water in the base.
Generally speaking, about two-thirds of what you put in
is the maximum that you're realistically going to get out.
And with lighter roasts,
I would say you want as much through the coffee
as you possibly can.
With darker roasts, I'd be much happier with say,
150g coming out of this pot or even 120g,
because I don't need all of that water
to properly extract the coffee.
Now this here is pretty strong, it's pretty intense.
It's very enjoyable if you like a stronger coffee.
I'd say it's even more enjoyable with lighter roasts
to dilute it down a little bit
as a kind of moka pot Americano,
or you could go for something like a milk drink
where this is the base of your drink
and you're gonna add steamed or heated milk to that
for a delicious beverage.
Now if your pot comes up short,
if you start sputtering
before you've got your desired amount of liquid out,
then there's two things that could be at play.
One, your grind might be a little bit too fine.
That tends to cause the system to heat up much quicker,
and that can be a problem.
However, generally speaking,
I wanna use the finest grind that I can,
especially with lighter roasts, to get maximum flavor,
so the other issue may be
that the pot got too hot too quickly.
Try reducing the heat more once liquid starts to flow
or having the pot spend a little bit more time off the heat.
That way, you should be able to get
to about two thirds of the liquid out of the pot
without hitting that angry sputtering phase
that adds so much bitterness to your cup.
One last variable to discuss
is the size of pot that you're using.
This is really gonna come into it
when it comes to reducing the heat.
With a much larger pot like this,
you can let the heat run
that little bit further into liquid starting to flow
than you can do it with a much smaller pot.
Here, as soon as liquid appears,
I'd pretty much take the whole pot off the heat.
It doesn't need any more energy
to get that very small amount of liquid through the coffee.
With this thing,
you are gonna add a little bit more heat
for a little bit longer,
just because there's so much water in that base
compared to this thing here,
there's a lot more energy required
to kind of maintain that temperature and pressure.
It might seem like a lot of effort, a lot of fuss,
it gets easier the more you do it.
I'm not gonna say this is the easiest brewer in the world.
I know it's popular, I know it's in so many households
and brewed with everyday by so many people,
but when it comes to specialty coffees,
it does need a little bit more care and attention,
but I still think you can get some really great results.
But now I want to hear from you down in the comments below,
let me know how this has changed
the way that you brew your moka pots.
Let me know the results.
How has the coffee changed for you?
Is it better, is it sweeter,
is it cleaner, is it less bitter?
That's what we're really aiming for here.
Let us know down in the comments below,
but for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.