Please, clean your moka pot
Algorithms on social networks have shown me videos of people still defending the idea that moka pots should not be cleaned because "all the oils they accumulate over time make the coffee taste better".
People, I'm sorry to say that this is not true.
Can you think of any single organic food element that, when heated up over and over again for months (or even years) on end, helps things taste better? That would defy everything we know about food science.
But also, science already tested it and proved that the coffee oils left inside moka pots make heat distribution uneven and make the taste more rancid and bitter. I don't care about what your grandma or the Italians or whoever else say, clean your damn moka pots. With soap and water. And then rinse it thoroughly.
Stop with this nonsense, please.
Edit: Some people reached me through the ether saying maybe it's the same thing that people say about cast-iron pans.
People, I'm sorry to inform you that you should also wash your cast-iron cookware. Maybe this is a North American thing because dishwashers are so common there, I don't know, but you can wash them, just use a bit of mild soap and scrub it gently, run it through water to remove all the soap, and do not let it air dry, use paper towel instead to remove the water, and then you hang it.
It is the same process for the moka pot.