My wife gave me an early Xmas gift of a Bialetti Musa 6-cup stainless moka pot. I have been looking at moka pots for years but could never bring myself to buy the aluminum ones on display in stores. She was apprehensive about the taste. She lived in Italy for a couple months many years ago and used a moka daily.

I have to say this moka blew us away with my home-roasted coffee, both a Rwandan and a Guat Finca Anita to FC (440F) on my Quest.

300ml cold water in base
27gm coffee (1:11 coffee to water ratio) ground between Drip/Auto Drip on my Bunn G1
(I used my Aeropress funnel to get the coffee into the Moka basket)
moka pot placed on side of burner to keep handle away from heat
medium heat on electric range until coffee starting coming up then low heat
once coffee blonds, take it off and cool bottom briefly under tap water

Served in tea cups. Note that this 6-cup 300ml moka delivers 270ml of actual coffee (I measured 70 ml remaining)

Amazingly sweet, nice body and acidity. Made a great cup as I like rich coffee.

Compared to my PID'd Gaggia, the result was more mellow but still rich and delicious. The Gaggia is richer, oilier, and more amplified (I am comparing the straight Moka to a long black form the Gaggia... obviously the true espresso from Gaggia is moussier and more concentrated)

In all, a great purchase. This will be great for travel too. Last year I took my Yama siphon and Encore grinder to my parents. This year, I'll take the moka instead.

I imagine it might feel a little silly, but having great beans, fresh roasted in my Quest, and ground properly on my G1, a simple brewer like this moka would be fine. I struggled a lot when I first got into coffee, but it was a lot of wasted effort trying to adapt my brewing to poorly ground and poorly roasted mediocre beans. Now I am trying to unlearn my bad brewing habits.

Basically, crappy beans need finicky roasting. Bad roasting needs finicky grinding. Bad grinding needs finicky brewing. Bad brewing needs extra water, milk, etc. So if you go back to the beginning of the chain and work forward, everything gets way better and way more forgiving fast. Working backwards from the brewing equipment is just kind of dumb.

I've read a fair bit of research on expert vs. novice thinking. The science shows that novices work backwards from their result while experts fully model the situation and work forwards from first principles. Much of the posting on coffee websites is in the novice form of trouble-shooting. I suspect, as well-intentioned as we all are, we probably end up wasting a lot of each other's time. I guess that comes from a lot of impatience that leads to hacking.

HappyCat, I've had better results with a Moka pot when I've preboiled the water, FWIW. I suppose the results could depend on the beans and grind, though.

It's an easy search online to find plenty of brewing methods discussed. You might try a few variations to get to know your Moka pot more, and what works best with what. In any event, if you spend any time in Italy, it's a good skill to have acquired.

What are your thoughts on the Stumptown Coffee moka pot method http://stumptowncoffee.com/brew-guides/moka-pot/ ? It uses preboiled water which I find cuts back on the strange metalic/burnt taste associated with moka pots.

It looks like Stumptown tries to stop brewing by applying cold water to the boiling chamber when most of the coffee is extracted; perhaps they attribute the metallic taste to overextraction. Like them, I have a steel (not aluminum) Moka pot, and I've found that preheating the water accelerates the brewing process and results in better-tasting coffee. Steel is much slower to heat than aluminum, so anything that makes the process faster is probably better.

If Moka pot coffee has a burnt flavor, I would suspect either overroasted beans or the results of slower brewing (meaning the grinds are exposed to dry heat longer).