Is this the world’s biggest cafetera? We hunted down this coffee legend
This is a story about love, about heartbreak, but mostly about the biggest cafetera I have ever seen.
How strong was its pull? Strong enough to lure me inside of a Bed, Bath & Beyond. That’s where a co-worker had said she’d spotted it — a 50-cup stovetop espresso maker.
Let’s stop for a second to appreciate what that means.
Any self-respecting Cuban coffee lover has, at the very least, two cafeteras in his or her house. In mine, there’s the tiny single-serving cafetera that looks like it came from a Hobbit’s kitchen that I use when I’m making coffee only for myself. And I own a more presentable 3-cup maker when I’m brewing to share (as Cuban coffee should be).
In a larger family, you may own a 10-cup maker, which takes a strong forearm to lift — and to whisk enough sugar to make ample espumita for that kind of crowd.
But a 50-cup moka pot? This is gold-plated toilets on a Lear jet. Caviar lavished atop of uni. This is coffee porn for a cafetera lover. I had to see it for myself.
When an employee at the Bed, Bath & Beyond at Dadeland Station pointed at it, I looked right past it. I can only imagine that it was so big my brain filtered it out from the landscape.
The 50-cup cafetera from Bialetti must be appreciated from a distance, like the Empire State building or the Grand Canyon.
Tiny espresso cups look like children’s toys beside it. It would take 50 spoonfuls of sugar and a saucepan to whip enough espumita. This one had bags (plural) of Lavazza coffee stuffed inside as a display of its might — like a U.S. aircraft carrier running war games off the South China Sea.
A manager came over and must have seen my mouth agape.
“We get people taking selfies with it. They love it,” Luis Castells said.
And I get it. I could imagine this thing at nochebuena, paired alongside a lechon inside a caja china, a feast for fifty in a single brew.
I looked at the price tag and gasped: $649.99. A Lamborghini for someone else’s household.
But there was something else, news the manager hated to break to me. He looked down and rubbed the back of his head. He pointed to the fine print in the description: “display-only, non-working.”
He held the base as I unscrewed the top — a two-person job — to find the filter and funnel missing. But everything else was in place for it to work: the brass pressure nut, the silo-shaped opening up into the top. All it needs is some Hialeah ingenuity to fashion the missing parts.
Then again, Luis stepped in as the voice of reason.
“That amount of pressure, it’d be like a bomb in your kitchen,” Castells said. “I would do it outside, bro. On a fire pit or something.”
You could always find another use for it: to store your ashes, like the son of the moka pot’s creator, Renato Bialetti. (That took a weird turn, didn’t it?)
Castells is right. The 50-cup cafetera’s destiny remains a fantasy for display purposes only. He said a local coffee shop bought one for its window. I envision these replacing a pair of lions at the entrance of a Kendall McMansion.
I lift it back onto the display and dream: Maybe, just maybe. Your move, Hialeah.
This story was originally published February 14, 2019 at 12:56 PM.
