Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a very traditional Italian espresso roasted in Italy by Moka Sirs and provided by my amici at Si, Espresso here in the USA. My “origin story” in coffee ties directly back to Italy, so I’m a sucker for this style of coffee and I’m happy you’ve decided to come along on this journey with me today! Slurp…
Si, Espresso website (distributor of Moka Sirs in the USA)
Purchase this coffee directly for $25.99/1kg (2.2lbs)
My review of Moka Sirs Pregiato Blend
MOKA SIRS ESPRESSO SELEZIONE BLEND
To help you understand my point of view on traditional Italian espressos like Moka Sirs’ Selezione blend requires me to get a little bit into my past as it pertains to coffee, so please bear with me for a few seconds here. My dad was a “coffee guy” and I fondly remember going into stores in the mall that sold coffee from big barrels. We’d go in and smell them together and he’d explain that “the darker and the more oily, the better…” Fast forward to 1987 and our family moved to Rome, Italy, following a job assignment from my dad’s employer. Of course, part of living in Rome and going into the city with my dad meant frequent stops at Roman coffee bars for a quick espresso (and taking in the peculiar café culture of that city at that time), watching him drink espresso after meals in restaurants, etc. Over time, I picked up the habit myself, more in the year or two before I moved back to the United States when I was 18. Of course, this left an indelible experience in my DNA and subsequent visits back to Italy have always involved going to lots and lots of cafés, which is easy to do in a place like Rome where I think it may be a law that every city block has at least 2 coffee bars! LOL While we’re on the subject, let me give a quick plug to the blog, Coffee In Rome. It hasn’t been updated since 2017, but it is still a wealth of information about Roman coffee bars, so worth checking out.
All this being said, traditional Italian style espresso isn’t the best tasting, in my opinion, nor is the traditional bar/restaurant way of pulling shots (at least in Rome, where I’m most familiar with coffee culture) the best method but this dark, thick, bitter espresso is still something I love. The type of coffee I’m talking about tends to be on the dark side of roast level, often has Robusta species added (which produces tons of beautiful crema, but has more caffeine and bitterness than Arabica coffee), and the method usually involves the barista grinding a doser full of coffee for the rush, so it has been sitting for a while, and using small doses around 7-10g to quickly pull a small shot. This is a wide generalization, but at least when I lived in Rome and on several trips back where I am actually paying a lot more attention to the barista and the goings-on behind the bar, this is still pretty accurate. But for me, there’s so much more to this than the drink itself. You’re drinking it standing in a busy coffee bar with, often, dozens of locals from the neighborhood, people are talking and laughing and gossiping and going about their day. There’s a good chance there is a street just feet away from you that has tons of character or there’s a piazza or a beautiful monument within view, all adding to the ambience and experience.
So, for me as a reviewer, even when I’m drinking this type of coffee in my kitchen, without the entire experience, I am still pretty biased to enjoy this style of espresso because it transports me to one of my favorite memories from one of my favorite places. Italy will always be home to me, so this is one of the ways I can embrace that between the very infrequent trips I get to make there about once every 10 years or so. I’ve already buried the lead, but without further ado, let’s get on to this coffee!
Moka Sirs has been roasting coffee outside of the city of Pavia, Italy, about 1 hour’s drive south of Milano, since 1954. Moka Sirs was founded by Giovanni Migliorini, who thought the English word, “sir,” embodied the epitome of class, style and elegance, so he worked it into his company’s name. Moka Sirs produces a lot of coffee, including the subject of today’s review, their Selezione blend. I have previously reviewed their Pregiato Blend, which is 30% Robusta and 70% Arabica. The Selezione blend is 20% Robusta, 80% Arabica, and is roasted to a slightly darker level than the Pregiato. Moka Sirs is distributed in the USA by Si, Espresso, who also carry a lot of other Italian coffee brands, as well as equipment and accessories related to coffee. They’ve been gracious in providing me with coffee to review, fueling my walk down nostalgia lane with these traditional-style Italian coffees!
The Selezione blend comes in a big 1kg bag (2.2lbs) for a nice price of $25.99 from Si, Espresso. Unfortunately, Moka Sirs does not provide “roasted on” dates on their bags, only “expiration dates,” which I don’t find useful. The expiration date on my bag, for example, is 6/2022, and I think Si, Espresso sent this coffee to me in March 2021. It’s not uncommon in the coffee roasting world to see expiration dates from 1-1.5 years out from the roasting date. In general, espresso does its best when it is around 10 days off roast, and I generally don’t mind the flavors I get from it even 4-6 weeks off roast in most cases. It can get trickier to pull as it gets to that age, being more finicky and more prone to channeling, in my opinion, but flavors are still pretty good in most cases. I have no idea how coffee would behave 12+ months after roasting! So, I have no idea how fresh, or not, the Moka Sirs coffees I’ve received are, but that being said, I’ve had this bag of Selezione open for a good 2 months and have seen no major changes in flavor or how it pulls in the machine, so it’d be worth a try for you, too. I can say the Selezione and the Pregiato blends both freeze well, so my suggestion would be to separate this large bag into 1-week portions and then freeze it, bringing out a new bag and letting it thaw out overnight. For this bag, I have also left a good amount of the coffee unfrozen, in the bag just sitting on my counter and even 2+ months after I first opened it, the shots are still pulling well. IMHO most of the flavor in this coffee comes from the roast and not so much from the origin of the beans, so I haven’t seen a lot of difference in the flavors over that time. I’d still recommend freezing, as I think the coffee may be picking up some extra bitterness now, but overall, I’ve found this coffee to be quite resistant to the problems of aging that would sideline a lot of other coffees.
Moka Sirs says Selezione it is a blend of Central American and Brazilian Arabicas with Indian and Indonesian Robustas, giving “Selectione a spicy profile and cocoa notes. The medium roasting brings out a thick cream and a full lasting taste.” I can’t find the percentages of Robusta and Arabica anywhere on the website, but Si, Espresso told me that Selezione is 20% Robusta. The Selezione blend gets a “medium-dark” roast while the Pregiato I’ve had previously was “medium.” The Selezione beans are visually darker and have some oils on the surface, while the Pregiato beans do not. Unfortunately I forgot to reserve some of the Pregiato beans to test on my Roast Vision instrument, but the Selezione beans have a reading of 16 on a scale of 0-35, with 0 being the darkest. This converts to about a 67 on the more standard Agtron scale, in case you’re more familiar with that. This is a “medium” on the Roast Vision scale.
Just like its cousin, the Pregiato blend, the Selezione pulls really nicely and is a very forgiving coffee in terms of how easy it is to work with. I found this to be a VERY consistent coffee, I never got channeling, spitting, etc. Now, one caveat to this review is that I have added Quick Mill’s manual pressure valve to my Carola Evo machine, so I am grinding coffee REALLY fine, running a pre-infusion at 1.5-2 bars until the entire bottom of the portafilter is saturated, then I ramp up to full pressure and back down to simulate a manual lever machine. This is a very different style of pulling espresso than simply running the pump at full pressure and timing the shot, so I really haven’t been timing any of my shots. I find this coffee does fine anywhere from a 1:1 ristretto style shot to something in the 1.5-1.75 range, so if I use an 18g dose I’m happy with anything from about 20-27g in the cup.
The two things I noted right away about the differences between this Selezione and the Pregiato blend with more robusta is the amount and color of crema. The Pregiato is still the reigning champion when it comes to prettiness, and, no joke, if I was a photographer or videographer doing an espresso shoot, the Pregiato blend would be the coffee I’d use as a supermodel! The Selezione blend produces a thick, shaving cream-like consistency of crema, too, but there’s a bit less of it and it’s much darker than the Pregiato crema. This is definitely the darkest crema of any espresso I’ve ever pulled, with it being the color of a milk chocolate bar as opposed to the light tan color of most espresso cremas. From the side it looks much lighter, as you can see in the photos below, but on top it has that chocolatey color that is pleasant, but not quite as pretty as the Pregiato’s. As the shot starts to blonde, too, you get progressively lighter crema, so you’ll see more variation on the surface of the coffee than from the Pregiato blend. This is purely an aesthetic thing and doesn’t mean anything in terms of flavor.
Flavor-wise, this transports me right back to the Italian coffee bars I love so much. With nothing added, this espresso has a ton of cocoa notes, hints of roasted nuts and the promised bitterness associated with, well, coffee, but particularly robusta. There is a good amount of roastiness in this coffee, too. I don’t get a lot of “burnt rubber” or that type of note here. I did pull a shot and drink it the way my dad (and everyone else in a Roman coffee bar) would have in the 1980’s and added a healthy amount of sugar to it, something I never do. This balanced out the bitterness in the shot, of course, and was very delicious like a tiny dessert. Surprisingly, tt actually ramped up a lot of the roastiness and nuttiness and took the cocoa notes down. I perceived a bit of burnt rubber with the sugar added and it was quite apparent in the very long aftertaste, something I did not notice in my many shots without sugar. I actually enjoyed the plain shot over the one with added sugar, in this case.
It’s impossible for me to separate Moka Sirs Selezione from the nostalgia and fondness I have for Italian espresso culture. The two things are tightly entertwined, for me, so I know a good portion of my appreciation of this coffee comes from my love and appreciation of Italian café culture and all the tradition that comes with it. If you’re looking for a “bold” coffee that will stand up to milk and sugar really well and have no fruitiness to it, this is your pick. If you are looking for a bright, fruit-forward espresso, then you’d have to look elsewhere. For me, it’s all about the mood I’m in and what I’m craving at the time. A super-bright, fruity single origin espresso roasted by any number of specialty coffee roasters here in Kansas City is a totally different experience, for me, compared to this blend that takes me back to my coffee roots. Most mornings, I actually drink one of each, pulling something very light and fruity with tons of origin character, and following it up with a cup of this Selezione, so I get the best of both experiences whenever I want!