Get this in the hands of James Hoffman, I’d love to hear his take on it
But everyone is terrified of mokasplosion.
I’ll admit, the prospect of a pressurized vessel of boiling water is a potent reminder for precautionary thinking.
The custom where I am at is to load the moka pot with a grind and quantity that produces a significant barrier to the flow of water.
The alert that the brew is finished is the sound of the boiling hot water and steam spraying the coffee through the standpipe into the upper chamber, and it is absolutely under steam pressure, I’d say around 5 to 10 psi.
When the liquid water is low enough that it doesn’t get picked up by the lower tube, you get a significant outflow of pure steam hissing through the standpipe nozzle, and then it’s quiet, as the bottom chamber is now completely dry, as are the grounds when you dump them out.
It could be that if you use a coarser grind or less coffee than is customary here, flow restriction does not occur, and the pressure of the heated air and water vapor is enough to push out all of the water through the coffee without reaching 100c (should only take about 1/6 psi for a flow overcoming gravity to that height) but if you used that method here your coffee would fall under heavy criticism.
The violence with which the flow jets into the upper chamber and the volume and aroma of the steam serves somewhat as a social signal as to the “quality” of the coffee, so there is a strong incentive to heavily load the pots here.
Legends of exploding pots are common, as is precautionary disposal of pots whose threads have become excessively worn.
But I still have no first hand knowledge of anyone witnessing an explosion or even an over pressure venting event (there is a small pressure relief valve on the side of the vessel)…. So I suspect that the risk is not that high.
He, like many others, do little more than just read spec sheets.
I like his car related content though, reckless driving notwithstanding
Another high-hour channel for me is Petter of Mentour Pilot.
As an Australian, those two guys accents their way of framing things are like mum’s lullabies.
That is not to say that I personally take all or most of Hoffman's suggestions at face value. It's abundantly clear that the level of nuance he considers in coffee is not relevant to me. But I do tend to see him applying a much more objective level of rigor to his reviews than many other content creators.
I have great respect for his integrity and body of work
Also has very good books. So, totally not the average youtuber/content creator out there.
He's mentioned modding espresso machines many times in his videos, and brings it up often during reviews.
Coffee is more niche. It makes more sense for "objective credibility" to play a role there.
MKBHD is absolutely as qualified as 99% of his peers.
I would say his success is largely due to being among the first to the market in tech reviews and having (at the time) better production quality.