I wanted to try a moka pot, so I went back to this thrift store where I had seen some before, and of course they were all gone.

After a lot of browsing, I came across this thing that looked suspiciously coffee gadget-like, looked up the manufacturer Ilsa, and it turns out to be a Neapolitan coffee maker, 1-2 cups.

Ilsa doesn’t make this particular model anymore. Their current lineup of Neapolitan coffee brewers have long handles or plastic handles.

This is for good reason, because the whole brewer is supposed to go on a stovetop to boil, and the bar handles on mine got quite hot in my first attempt to use this thing.

I did watch some videos on how to use this thing, and in one of them, a coffee vendor in Naples has a pot that doesn’t have any handles at all, so he just uses a towel to handle it after heating. That is what I wound up doing.

The way the steel bar handles interlock to keep everything together, and the lack of a long spout as seen on their current models, make me suspect that my brewer is designed to be packed for travel.

More pictures:

P.s. These Neapolitan brewers are supposed to have a little dent in the filter’s side to allow boiling water and steam to escape to a tiny hole. This signals that the water is boiling, and the brewer is ready to be flipped.

But does it brew coffee? Yes it does, and very strong coffee by my French press and Aeropress standards. I’m still feeling a bit jittery here in the afternoon.

Nice and smooth with a dark roast, but it turned out less hot than I like, so I’ll have to work on my process…

A few fines came through. Nothing that my regular French press doesn’t also produce.