Stovetop Brew Show: Moka pots, morning rituals, and trying to mind my business.
I'm not a coffee snob.
In the world of things to be a little pretentious about, I’ve picked some quieter ones—things which do not and may never include coffee notes and roast and other things. Crema means, really, not much to me. My “go to” iced vanilla latte is the product of a coffee chat in its social excuse of a thing—a ready-made order for that tangible reason to see someone, and the $6 I’m then willing to spend to get to see them. Most weekdays now, though, I’m up too late, and float through an 8:30am or 9:00 to return home afterward for a real morning. For a cup of coffee, and waking up to life.
Halfway insomniac, here’s a thing I've come to depend on for livelihood—on the days I don't wrongly convince myself I'm properly functional without it. Something which has degraded itself from the Dutch Bros Golden Eagle® social ritual of high school, to a rudimentary tool. And, maybe, one better left unseen.
This past summer, I spent two weeks hiking in Italy with a University of Oregon program. Coffee became a rudimentary thing. Espresso for function, for crack-of-dawn mornings. Risk the mouth to drink it scalding, no room or thought for cream. To make the trip worth the 20-hour travel days, I tacked on three more. By the end I found myself in Florence, alone, set on finding a couple of things: a surplus of sandwiches, nice places to people-watch and sit, more coffee, one nice perfume, and a moka pot to take home as a true Italian souvenir.
I thought the way around something performative, with the moka pot, was to eschew brand name—to make myself into a user sans little Bialetti man pointing up at me. My roommate had mentioned something before I left, about the kitchen appliance’s fundamental unpurchasability. “That comes from a grandmother,” she’d said. But there’s no Italy in me. So, I tucked myself into a random general shop down a sidestreet and found a nondescript silver pot to take home, small enough to fit in my duffel—the laughably oversized backpack that for the three weeks had been holding the rest of my life. The woman working the store didn’t speak English, and I no Italian, but she let me change my mind three times between two smallest sizes.
It turns out, the name of the moka pot comes from Yemen—for the city Mokha, a top coffee export and namesake for the chocolatey barely-coffee variant too.
The design, stovetop brewer that builds pressure and vaporizes water up through the grounds, begins with a patent in 1818. But in Italy, 1933, Alfonso Bialetti was the one to turn it into something essential to the culture of the country.
The moka pot forged a universality in the coffee world, meant to make something cafe-style and espresso-adjacent accessible at home. It privatized the social camaraderie of coffee in the public space—but did it in an art form.
Ironically, something so beautiful also creates a kind of invitation to be seen. There are Dolce & Gabbana designs, latticed red and blue variants of a high fashion version of the machine meant to turn espresso into a true everyday thing. I read about one on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and imagined the decorated ones I’ve seen. Instead, it’s the classic silver design. One like mine, which lives now hidden in the drawer under the stove.
Before, essentially, I assumed this was a ritual designed to be observed. The notion of “performance”—whatever that is—it’s one that I have a hard time with. One that's come in full front and center recently in a bigger, ironic conversation about masculinity and un-genuine ingenuity. It's something I thought about earlier in the summer, skipping out on a lux beauty shop in Paris to psychoanalyze instead the velvet-roped line outside—all people who had been fed the same algorithm feeds, calling the place something of a hidden gem. It's something I've been thinking about forever at home, in Bend, tallying endless IPA-drinking Pit Vipers and Puffer Vests. It's something I think about now, writing with a mug next to me and its thimble-full of murky dark coffee, made the “right way” in that moka pot from Italy.
The thing with anyone decidedly “performative,” is that we now refuse to see something organic in archetype. Or, we convince ourselves we must attribute archetype to the every organic—outfit a label in order to understand anyone easier, even ourselves. I begin to question in myself, and in everybody, what I should even be looking for to be able to recognize something close to authenticity. There’s distance from the human experience, and it bleeds into morning ritual; I question even a new way to start the day.
The moka pot demands time from me that I must wait with only myself. No push-button instant espresso machine like mine at home. No plastic-seeping K-pod relic of life in the dorm. And, no one to see.
When I look up Junior Express now—the dinky alternative which spoke to me—I get $10 eBay listings with one like mine sold as “vintage.” There’s a romantic dissonance between the aesthetic of a kitchen archive piece held on through modern ages and technologies, and the fear I felt first using the thing—convinced with every fiber of my being that I’d given myself aluminum poisoning.
To cliche authenticity, maybe the thing that strikes in that as performance is simply in the channeled intensity of identity. The grappling for some self, and clinging onto the inanimate thing in order to say: “Here. I’m this kind of person. This is me.” Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Even if you convince yourself you’re overcommitted to a new level of brewing your coffee.
With my moka pot, that’s probably something no one needs to see—something allowed into a private routine. What a thing to get self-conscious about my morning coffee. They won't bury me in one—like they did Alfonso Bialetti's son, Renato, in 2016. But I guess writing about it, now it's undeniably some part of me.
Sources:
The History of the Moka Pot | the Sunday Baker
Alfonso Bialetti. Moka Express. Designed 1933 (this example 2008) | MoMA
Bialetti Dolce&Gabbana® Collection - Moka, cups | DG®
Renato Bialetti: Italy’s coffee king buried in his Moka pot | CNN
About the author: Lindsey is a sophomore at UO studying English and, technically, Journalism. She likes to write, and thinks too much, and sometimes writes down those things she’s thinking. Some favorite things at the moment are Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories, a wood-wick fig candle, and that one really yellow tree in the cemetery.
Lindsey has a bit of a LinkedIn vendetta, so you can follow her on Instagram at @lindseympease or find her blog to read whenever she does return to it: open.substack.com/pub/lplinernotes