Ground coffee · 5 min readby Amazon Espresso Crema ground coffee review
The cheapest ground coffee on the site at 23p a cup, roasted in Italy and sold at an espresso grind. That last detail is the whole buying decision.
Twenty-three pence a cup is the lowest figure in our ground catalogue, and this coffee earns it honestly: a kilo, split into four 250g packs, Rainforest Alliance certified, roasted and packed in Italy. The catch is not quality. It is that Amazon cut this at an espresso grind and recommend it for espresso machines, so the bag is right for a pump machine or a moka pot and wrong for a cafetière. Buy it for the brewer it was made for and it is the best value ground coffee we price. Put it in a French press and you will wonder what everyone is talking about.
The cheapest ground coffee we track at 23p a cup, cut at an espresso grind and genuinely good in the brewer it was made for.
- Tastes
- Dark chocolate and caramel, robusta-backed
- Strength
- Strong
- Best for
- Home espresso and moka
- Valuecup price vs the format median
- 5/5
- Easy to likefrom the roast profile
- 3/5
- Good for beginnersblend, roast and pack size
- 3/5
Buy it ifYou own an espresso machine or a moka pot and want the lowest cup price on the site.
Skip it ifYou brew in a cafetière, where an espresso grind over-extracts and slips through the mesh.
Live prices, sizes and retailers for this coffee sit on its product page. This review is the analysis alongside it. See prices →
What Amazon actually publish
More than you might expect from a value own-label. Amazon state the bean mix outright at 65% arabica and 35% robusta, put the roast at medium, rate the coffee 4 out of 5 on their own strength scale, and print Rainforest Alliance certification on the pack. The published tasting notes are a full-bodied, balanced blend with dark chocolate and caramel. It is roasted and packed in Italy, and the kilo arrives as four sealed 250g packs rather than one open sack.
The most useful line in that listing is the shortest one: suitable for espresso machines. A pre-ground coffee is cut once, and the roaster's recommendation tells you what it was cut for. This one was cut for espresso.
| Specification | What Amazon publish |
|---|---|
| Bean mix | 65% arabica, 35% robusta |
| Roast | Medium (3 of 5) |
| Strength on the label | 4 out of 5 |
| Grind cut for | Espresso machines |
| Certification | Rainforest Alliance |
| Roasted in | Italy |
| Pack | 1kg, as four 250g packs, about 55 cups |
| Cost | £0.23 per 18g cup |
The grind decides where this works
Grind size controls how fast water can move through coffee, which controls how much it dissolves out. A fine espresso grind packs tightly and gives water a lot of surface to attack, which is exactly what you want under nine bars of pressure for 30 seconds. Give that same grind four minutes of unpressurised contact in a cafetière and you get the same extraction several times over, which is where bitterness comes from. You also get sludge, because grounds cut for a portafilter basket are small enough to walk straight through a mesh plunger.
So the pack is not a general-purpose ground coffee, whatever the shelf implies. It is a specific tool. Here is where it lands.
| Brewer | How it goes |
|---|---|
| Espresso machine | What it was cut for. The intended use. |
| Moka pot | Very good. Moka wants a fine grind just short of espresso. |
| Aeropress | Works, and short brew times suit it. |
| Filter machine | On the fine side. Expect a slow drip and a heavier cup. |
| Cafetière | Avoid. Over-extraction and sediment in the mug. |
This is the single most common way people waste money on pre-ground coffee: buying the cheapest bag on the shelf without checking which brewer it was ground for. The grind is printed or implied on almost every pack, and it costs nothing to read. Beans or ground: what you actually give up
23p a cup, in real money
At 23p on our standard 18g dose this is the cheapest ground coffee in the catalogue, and it sits a long way under the roughly 40p a cup our ground catalogue clusters around. Over a year at two cups a day that is about £168, against roughly £292 for a coffee sitting on the median. That is £124 a year, which is not a rounding error, and it is the strongest argument the pack has.
| Coffee | Per cup | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| by Amazon Espresso Crema | £0.23 | £168 |
| Lavazza Qualità Rossa | £0.25 | £183 |
| Ground coffee median | £0.40 | £292 |
The four-pack split does real work here too. Ground coffee goes stale from the moment the seal breaks, faster than beans and much faster than instant, because grinding multiplies the surface exposed to air. A kilo in one bag is a coffee that is noticeably tired by the bottom. A kilo in four 250g packs is four fresh starts.
The robusta, and the bitterness complaints
Amazon are upfront that this is 35% robusta, which is a genuinely useful disclosure and also the reason for the most consistent criticism the pack attracts. Robusta carries more caffeine and more of the harsh, woody compounds that read as bitterness, and it is used in espresso blends because it also builds the thick crema the product is named after. That is a trade, not a defect, and the Italian espresso tradition has been making it deliberately for a century.
- The dominant positive theme is value: strong coffee in quantity, without the burnt note that some cheap ground coffee has.
- The grind itself is consistently described as even, which matters more than it sounds at this price.
- The dominant negative theme is bitterness, which buyers who mention it tend to attribute to the robusta share and the roast together.
- Nobody reports it as weak. If anything the complaints run the other way.
Read those two clusters together and a fair picture emerges. This is a robusta-backed espresso blend doing exactly what a robusta-backed espresso blend does. If that is the coffee you wanted, the price is remarkable. If you were hoping for a delicate arabica cup, the label told you it was not one.
Who should skip it
Cafetière drinkers, first and most clearly. There is a coffee on this same site ground specifically for a cafetière at 38p, and the 15p gap buys you a cup that is not full of silt. Skip it too if robusta is something you avoid on principle, because a third of this bag is robusta and no amount of brewing technique changes that. And skip it if you want brightness or acidity: dark chocolate and caramel are the published notes, and buyers back them up.
For everyone else with an espresso machine or a moka pot on the hob, this is the cheapest sensible way to fill it that we have found. Judge it against other ground coffee rather than against a bag of freshly roasted single origin, and it wins on the axis it was built for.
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