Travelling Thoughts

My wifey and I went for a holiday in Naples and Rome, in Italy. And coming from a nation that consumes most coffee in the world, it wasn’t long before I made acquaintance with a quintessentially Italian invention, the Moka Pot.

Italy is also a culture where people have their quick espresso standing up in a café, rather than sitting down, perhaps to be productive or just to avoid the cover charge that comes along when you sit down. But it is also very convenient to have one or two of these Moka Pots in your home, ready to brew you a cup of the black elixir of life and energy.

Like so many things in life, it is a brilliantly simplistic invention and has been around for over 80 years. Traditionally, it resembles a clear, metallic coloured nut (as in bolts and nuts), but nowadays, you can get it in various colours and shapes. You can even get an electric Moka Pot, which is fantastic if you don’t have a stove, for instance.

As for me, I am a bit of a traditionalist and like to take a bit of downtime to brew my coffee. As a Finn, we use the filtered coffee makers to supply our coffees for morning brew as opposed to the Moka Pots, and one of the reasons is the ease of them: no need to heat up a stove and stand by whilst the Pot heats up and starts to brew your liquid energy. Instead, you just put in the water, shovel the ground coffee to a filter, and switch the power on. A few minutes later, your coffee is ready without supervision.

Having used gas stoves and electric ones to brew espresso with the Moka Pot, I have to say I much prefer the gas stove. It is so much easier to control the temperature and brewing speed, and the time heating up is so much faster.

But is the speed and control the importance here? Coffee is coffee? It tastes the same which ever way you prepare it?

Earlier on, I wrote two blogs about coffee: about the difficulty of quitting it once a year, and also a longer one about the benefits and drawbacks of it. May I suggest you read them as well as part of the “coffee culture” of my blog.

In the modern world, everything seems to be about speed and efficiency, even though older people, like me, can still remember how much tastier the food that our grandmothers made. One of the ingredients they used, in addition to butter and sugar, was time. The same seems to be true with brewing a cup of coffee.

Also, it is not just the time of flipping the switch on and scurrying off to complete one more task whilst the coffee maker takes the time to make us what we crave. It is also about us standing by the Pot, watching the magic happen. When we stand beside a Moka Pot, even for a few minutes, listen to its sounds, and see the coffee brew, it really enhances the anticipation of the taste to come. That, too, is an ingredient to make coffee taste better.

Having written about the topic before, I seem to circle back to it, time and time again. We need to slow down. We need to calm down for a moment and concentrate on ourselves and the things that matter most to us. Even if we are brewing a pot of espresso, we still need to savour the moment before the caffeine kicks in and gives us the boost to continue our hectic lives.

Maybe whilst watching the Moka Pot brew, you can plan for the upcoming summer or about the other important plans for the future. Maybe that is the time that you need for yourself. But perhaps most importantly,

remember to savour your coffee.