Bialetti

Bialetti's own site marks 1919 as the year the company began at its Coccaglio workshop outside Brescia, more than a decade before Alfonso Bialetti's octagonal Moka Express — the aluminum stovetop pot from Lake Orta that turned Italian kitchens into espresso bars — arrived in 1933. The company still operates its own roastery, La Torrefazione Bialetti, alongside the cookware lines that made the name a household fixture. Bialetti frames its identity around continuity: the site's own language, 'Reinventiamo il caffè dal 1919' (we've been reinventing coffee since 1919), and its claim to more than ninety years spent making 'the taste of being together.' The Moka's eight-sided aluminum body was engineered to distribute heat evenly across the base, forcing water up through the grounds under steam pressure — a design essentially unchanged since its debut and still the reference point for stovetop coffee worldwide. Recent decades have added licensing runs with Dolce & Gabbana, a Netflix tie-in, and The North Face, extending the brand into fashion and outdoor gear without retiring the core pot. What ships from Coccaglio today ranges from the original Moka through pressurized and electric variants, all roasted in-house rather than sourced out, which is unusual among mass-market Italian coffee names.