Why moka pots are brewing up a storm in nostalgia coffee-making

With few moving parts and no lead required, moka pots are an affordable choice in nostalgia coffee-making, and they deliver a flavoursome punch 

Bialetti Express six-cup, from €33 depending on edition.

My daughter and her 20-something friends are all buying moka pots. I was curious. A tiny manual espresso maker forcing water through a bed of pricey ground beans? It’s not the swiftest way to make the slimy oat milk coffees they all seem to love. A moka requires turning on a stovetop — not something common to exhausted post-grads with part-time jobs. Once you’ve wrangled the pot and its antique demands, you then need to deal with any hot milk additions separately. 

Dashing through life waving a Leap card, it seems a torturous choice for a morning brew. Still, the first time I watched unseen as my chick conjured coffee with her tiny red Bialetti, I realised what it is that’s nurturing this social-media trend. It’s the quiet ritual, the hands-on intentional steps, the intimate mechanics of engaging with the coffee grounds. All that measuring, eyeballing the fill, burnishing the protected and special coffee spoon, and replacing the hefty, handsome little pot on the shelf.