Ground coffee · 5 min readKimbo Espresso Napoli ground coffee review
A Neapolitan espresso grind in a 250g vacuum brick, rated 10 out of 13 for intensity. Buy it for an espresso machine or a moka pot, and ignore the rest of the brewer list.
Kimbo roast in Naples for the Neapolitan style, which means dark, thick and finished with a bitter cocoa note that the city treats as correct rather than a flaw. Espresso Napoli is their volume blend, arabica lifted with robusta, rated 10 out of 13 on Kimbo's intensity scale, and cut fine for espresso and the moka pot. The 250g brick is the smallest pack on this page and that is deliberate: a grind this fine loses its aroma fastest. At 43p a cup it is one of the dearer options here, and it is the only one that will genuinely reproduce a bar in Naples at home.
A proper Neapolitan espresso grind in a 250g brick at 43p a cup: right for espresso and moka, wrong for everything else.
- Tastes
- Dark, toasted bread and cocoa, bitter finish
- Strength
- Very strong
- Best for
- Moka pot and home espresso
- Valuecup price vs the format median
- 3/5
- Easy to likefrom the roast profile
- 3/5
- Good for beginnersblend, roast and pack size
- 2/5
Buy it ifYou own a moka pot or an espresso machine and want the Neapolitan style done properly.
Skip it ifYou brew in a cafetière, whatever the UK listing says about compatibility.
Live prices, sizes and retailers for this coffee sit on its product page. This review is the analysis alongside it. See prices →
A Neapolitan espresso grind, and what that commits you to
Kimbo cut this fine, for espresso machines and moka pots, and everything about the product follows from that decision. A fine grind gives water enormous surface area to work on, which is what produces the thick body and the long-lasting crema the Neapolitan style is built around. It is also why the coffee is packed in a vacuum brick rather than a bag: fine grounds oxidise fast, and a hard brick holding vacuum is the cheap and effective answer.
The commitment is that the grind has one and a half correct homes. In an espresso machine it is what it was made for. In a moka pot, which brews under about one and a half bars rather than nine, it is very close to ideal and is the way most Italian households would actually use it. Everywhere else you are fighting it.
| Specification | What Kimbo publish |
|---|---|
| Bean mix | Arabica and robusta, ratio not published |
| Arabica origin | South America |
| Robusta origin | Asia |
| Roast | Dark (4 of 5) |
| Intensity | 10 out of 13, Kimbo's own scale |
| Published notes | Toasted bread and chocolate, bitter cocoa finish |
| Grind cut for | Espresso machines and moka pots |
| Pack | 250g vacuum brick, about 14 cups |
| Cost | £0.43 per 18g cup |
The brewer list on some listings is too generous
Kimbo's own product pages name espresso machines and moka pots. Several UK retail listings widen that to include cafetières, percolators and filter machines. Treat the wider list as optimism. A grind cut this fine in a cafetière does two bad things at once: it over-extracts across four minutes of immersion, which is where the harsh, drying bitterness comes from, and a large share of it walks straight through the mesh and ends up as silt in the mug.
You can make it drinkable by cutting the brew time hard, to around two minutes, and decanting immediately. That is a workaround for a mistake rather than a recipe, and there is a coffee ground specifically for a cafetière on this same site for 5p a cup less.
| Brewer | How it goes |
|---|---|
| Espresso machine | The intended use. Thick body, long crema. |
| Moka pot | Excellent. This is how most Italian homes would use it. |
| Aeropress | Works well; short contact suits the fine grind. |
| Filter machine | Slow drip and a heavy, bitter cup. |
| Cafetière | Avoid. Over-extraction plus sediment. |
What Kimbo publish about the blend
Arabica and robusta together, with the arabica given as South American and the robusta as Asian. Kimbo do not publish the ratio, which is the one meaningful gap in an otherwise well-documented product. The published tasting notes are toasted bread and chocolate with a pleasantly bitter cocoa aftertaste, and Kimbo rate the blend 10 out of 13 on their own intensity scale.
Read that last note carefully, because it is unusually honest. Kimbo are not claiming this is a smooth coffee. They are telling you the finish is bitter and framing it as a feature, which in Neapolitan espresso it genuinely is. Robusta is doing much of that work: it builds crema, it adds caffeine, and it brings the woody bitterness that the style is built around. If a bitter finish is a deal-breaker for you, this pack is telling you so in advance.
The 250g brick is the right pack size
Fourteen cups per brick sounds miserly next to the kilos elsewhere on this page, and it is the correct engineering decision. Grinding coffee finer multiplies the surface exposed to oxygen, so an espresso grind stales faster than a cafetière grind, which stales faster than whole beans. A dark roast on top of that accelerates it again, because the roast has already cracked the bean structure open.
A 250g brick opened on Monday is finished within a fortnight in most households, which is roughly the window in which pre-ground coffee is still worth drinking. A kilo of the same grind would be tired long before the bottom. The trade is that the effective kilo price is high, at about £23.90, which is the second dearest on this page.
Once you break the vacuum on a brick the clock starts. Fold it hard, clip it, keep it in a cupboard rather than the fridge, and use it inside two weeks.
43p a cup, and what buyers report
At 43p this sits above the roughly 40p a cup our ground catalogue clusters around and works out at about £314 a year at two cups a day. The comparison that stings is the by Amazon pack: also an espresso grind, also arabica with robusta behind it, also roasted in Italy, at 23p. Kimbo's advantage is a genuine Neapolitan roasting house and a pack format that keeps the coffee fresh. Whether that is worth 20p a cup depends entirely on how much the style matters to you.
- Rich, full-bodied and creamy is the dominant positive theme, with low perceived acidity.
- Moka pot users are the most satisfied group, which follows from where the grind sits.
- Freshness is the recurring complaint. Reports of flat, stale bricks turn up often enough to be worth checking the date on arrival.
- The bitter finish divides people exactly as the published notes predict, and rarely surprises anyone who read them.
Who should skip it
Cafetière drinkers, first and firmly, whatever a listing tells you about compatibility. Anyone who finds bitterness unpleasant, because Kimbo describe a bitter cocoa aftertaste in their own copy and buyers confirm it. Anyone buying one bag for a mixed household, since a dark robusta-backed espresso blend is not a consensus coffee. And anyone shopping on price, because there is a cheaper espresso grind on this page at nearly half the cup cost.
For a moka pot on the hob every morning, though, this is the most appropriate coffee on this page by a distance. Bought for that job, it is not expensive so much as specific.
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