What does the Xpresso Pump do?

- It makes better tasting coffee!

- It eliminates bitter coffee!

- It saves you money on coffee beans!

Perfecting the Moka Pot

Hi. My name is Michael and I invented the Xpresso pump for the Moka pot. As a  coffee geek, I spent years figuring out how to brew better coffee in the Moka pot. The Xpresso pump allows you to precision extract your coffee so you get a better coffee out of your Moka pot.

Over the last decade, there has been a trend for cafe's to offer individually prepared pour-over brew. I first encountered it at Blue Bottle, in San Francisco. They pointed out that regular espresso loses some of the subtleties in the flavor, and wouldn't make it as strong as I like. But I tried it once, and while I didn't like the coffee, it brought to my attention that there were some nuances that I wasn't getting from my Moka pot. I found out that professional tasters NEVER evaluate beans using a Moka pot. And the reason is that it works by generating steam pressure in the tank, to push the water through the grounds. And steam comes from BOILING (or nearly) water. That's the catch: boiling water is TOO HOT. It scalds the coffee and extracts the nasties from the spent grounds (just cellulose, like any plant). So what makes the Moka pot so simple and elegant also is its Achilles' heel.

With so many Moka pots already out there, I decided to sacrifice the industrial design elegance and add an air pump that uses the universal pressure valve hole to connect it. By de-coupling water temperature from the pressure, you can choose any temperature you want for brewing. That not only solves the scalding issue, but it also opens a whole extra dimension of variation over what you can get from your beans.

Best Water Temperature for Brewing Coffee in a Moka Pot

I suspected brewing coffee with lower temperature water makes fantastic coffee! In fact, the temperature makes the flavor vary so much, you may now want to find out your own personal preference for brew temperature! Seriously. If you're a super-taster, you may have a preference that is precise to less than 5 degrees F. I've adopted the terms from broiling steaks to describe it: from rare to well-done. You know, some people (me among them) think well-done steak is a travesty, but for coffee, it really is an only style variable. I've found I like between 185 and 190 best myself. See our video about water temperature.

Brewing Better Coffee in the Moka Pot

The Xpresso pump for Moka pots allows you to precisely extract the perfect amount of caramelized sugars without over-extracting or scalded the coffee. In other words, the Xpresso pump allows your Moka pot to infuse a minimal amount of water through the grounds to make as concentrated an extract as possible. When all the good-tasting part has dissolved into the water, stop the pump. Do not put any more of what comes off of the grounds into your coffee.