I clean the moka pots used by others in our household. There is always fluid left behind in the bottom, and it is coffee-colored. Perhaps their technique is wrong. Any ideas?
That’s subjective. To me the stainless steel ones are perfect. They heat up slow enough that the coffee doesn’t burn before the water boils.
The aluminum version always gets too hot for my tastes. Also it tastes like aluminum for the first 6 brews after each washing up.
To each his own coffee rituals I guess 
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If you have a burned taste to your coffee it is because you have left it on the stove for too long. As long as there is still water in the bottom part (and you don’t put it on a to large fire, so the flames stay beneath the pot) it is physically impossible to heat up to more than 100 degrees celsius. For this reason the pipe through which the water is pressed up doesn’t extend all the way to the bottom, so some water will stay in the bottom part.
If you leave it on the stove after the brew is done, the water evaporates and the pot will heat up over 100 °C.
Once a pot has heated up too much the taste will be spoiled. You’ll need to thoroughly scrub it clean. And even then it will take 10s of brews before the taste returns no ‘not burnt’. And you’ll need to replace the gasket.
Also, when you remove the pot from the fire, the steam in the bottom part will cool. This causes it to suck a bit of coffee back from the grounds into the bottom. It is best to throw this out immediately, because if you leave it in it will give an ‘old coffee’ taste to the bottom part. Which will especially burn you if you ever forget to take it off the stove 
If you don’t burn your pot and you rinse the bottom part after each brew, it will brew very nice coffee (imho off course).
Never liked french press. Too much coffee grounds in the brew.
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Most likely the coffee is too finely ground.
And if you’re tasting rubber, either the stove is too hot (should be medium as stated by someone else; I go a little hotter out of impatience) and/or the gasket needs replacing.
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Ah that might be what I got too.
Oh so I shouldn’t have been cooking until the water runs out.
I personally like the Bialetti design, but for me the most beautiful moka pots are the Atomic and the Vesuviana (which don’t look like moka pots but operate on the same principal).
When it starts to blow steam and make bubbly noises, then it’s done. You can let it on the stove for maybe 1 minute more to get the last sputters of coffee (if you need 3 cups from a 2 cup pot) but never let the water run out.
If you do let the water run out, the small amount of coffee in the bottom part will burn, and it will give a burnt taste to all subsequent brews. You’ll need to thoroughly clean it. I always scrub it clean with a metal sponge(is that the term in english?) and afterwards with sand. Don’t forget to scrub behind the filter and replace the gasket. I also try to scrub out the inside of the small water pipes (very hard to do).
Then I boil it with vinegar. Not very good for the stainless steel, but it does seem to help the taste somewhat.
Even after all this work it will take a long time before the burnt taste is completely gone.
A big part of the problem with metal taste or misfunctioning is getter the wrong pot for the job. Moka pots come in different sizes for a reason. You can’t make a smaller or larger cup with the same pot. The water has to be filled to the line under the valve in order for it to work properly. If you want to make moka for 4 people then you have to use a 4 portion pot. If you only want 2 though, you have to switch down to a smaller pot.
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Oh but that’s the English pronunciation 
Close to sacrilege, but:
I make the max amount the pot will handle, and after enjoying a first fresh hot hit >don’t hit me< microwave little cups full over the next day or two.
What I really need to start doing is pour out all of the coffee into a glass jar, so the stuff isn’t sitting in the pot.
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la la la la la la la ( fingers in ears) I didn’t see that…
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Whoa, what are your intestines made of? Sheet metal?
… can I buy them? I wore out my old ones…
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Is the jury still out on this one? I first heard it around 30 years ago, concerning antiperspirants. It’s gained enough traction that my dad will no longer use the aluminum cookware that he and my mom had been using for half a century.
There was a report that Alzheimer’s disease plaques contained molecules of aluminum. One doctor made some noise (and likely made some book sales and appearance fees) to the effect that the aluminum caused Alzheimer’s.
We’ve moved way beyond that, but people hang on to these nuggets of fear.
I have a relative to not only avoids aluminum, but has dark thoughts about microwave ovens.
That’s what I remembered, but also something about the context of there being no control group, i.e. people who had died (with or without Alzheimer’s) without any aluminum in their system.
This is from 1983, but I read it 4 or 5 years later:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/195/does-exposure-to-aluminum-cause-alzheimers-disease
Well, you led me into an Internet rabbit hole…
I recall reading that the ‘aluminum’ spelling was a misprint on advertising literature in America by a chemist who had come up with a new process to produce the metal. On reading more, seems that Sir Humphrey David used both variants until settling on the ‘ium’ ending (thus cheering his classical chemistry buddies who always thought that ending was more consistent with other materials, potassium, sodium, magnesium etc):
Then the chemist, Charles Martin Hall, went and used ‘aluminum’ on all his advertising material - even though all his patent filings used the ‘ium’ ending - so maybe typo?
Language - it’s a (mostly) wonderful thing!
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