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By Lauren Joseph , Zoe Denenberg , and Carina Finn
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The best coffee subscriptions are so good, there’s no reason to ever wake up to an empty bag of beans. Coffee subscriptions are the ultimate in convenient caffenation, and even if you think you’re not a subscription person, I can pretty much guarantee that coffee will be the exception to that rule. No matter what your coffee routine is like, whether you’re obsessed with trying new single-origin coffee from small, craft roasters or like a tried-and-drue dark roast that reminds you of the classic cup of joe your parents used to drink, there’s a coffee subscription out there than can be tailored to your exact preferences.
When it comes to brewing high quality coffee in your own kitchen, there are two factors that trump just about all the rest. First, the beans themselves need to be freshly-roasted. This will have a bigger impact on the flavor of your morning brew than almost anything else, so all of the options below either roast to order, or within a week or so of shipping. Second, we do recommend that you grind your coffee beans just before brewing to get the best possible result out of your brewer. This rule applies to everything from the fanciest espresso machines to a simple French press and everything in between, so all of the subscriptions below offer whole bean options. If you don’t want to grind your own coffee, don’t worry—most of these subscription programs will handle that, too.
The whole point of a coffee subscription is to make your life easier. You don’t want to come home from vacation to a pile of beans that are past their prime, only to receive another package the following day. So these coffee subscriptions make it easy to put your coffee deliveries on hold, or cancel them altogether. You’ll also usually save some money when you opt for a coffee subscription, too, compared to buying a bag of beans every few weeks at your local coffee shop or grocery store.
Finally, there are a lot of coffee subscriptions out there, and we're trying new ones all the time. So watch this space for intel about the most exciting new coffee subscriptions that will help you revamp your mornings.
Single Roaster Coffee Subscription Boxes
Trade is a one stop shop with hundreds of good coffee options. We’ve long been fans for its approachable brewing guides, wide selection of beans from craft coffee roasters, and its commitment to ethical sourcing. To find your ideal bean, you’ll whiz through a speedy quiz that clocks your preferred gadgetry—Chemex, French press, coffee maker, etc.—before assessing your milk (nondairy options included) and flavor preferences. Do you favor a light or dark roast? How funky are you willing to go? It ends with the all important question of price. Select a subscription for $15.75 or swing for the premium beans at $17–$22 a bag. Regardless, once you select your beans, they’ll be roasted to order and shipped directly from the roaster for maximum freshness. And whatever you choose, you can know that the company is committed to only working with roasters who pay farmers a fair price for their beans.
Some of those roasters who work with Trade also offer their own subscription programs (including a few you’ll see later on this list). You’ll find legacy brands like Equator (its Prime Meridian bag was the perfect pairing for our recent AeroPress fixation) as well as tiny operations, like the family-owned crop-to-cup roasters Peixoto and Alma. And for that late afternoon cup? “We have a pretty large collection of really delicious decafs—such as Common Voice’s Perennial or Mother Tongue’s Decaf Fincas Mierisch—that are just as much a part of specialty coffee as their caffeinated counterparts,” says Maciej Kasperowicz, Trade’s Director of Coffee.
Atlas’s coffee of the month club is the most affordable subscription on the list—a monthly half bag, which makes about 15 cups of coffee, is $9. It’s also the one for someone who is curious about trying new coffee but not obsessive about their brew routine; the information included in each box focuses more on destination than on flavor details. Each month, Atlas ships out a bag of single-origin beans from a different country, each with a little card about the growing region and brewing tips. The countries include those commonly associated with high-end coffee (Ethiopia, Colombia, Rwanda, and Costa Rica) as well as countries you rarely see (for example, India, Congo, and Indonesia).
Choose whole bean, ground, or coffee pods (yes, Atlas makes Keurig-compatible cups), type of roast, and frequency, then sit tight as your beans are roasted to order in Austin before being shipped to your doorstep.
MistoBox also curates hundreds of varieties of quality coffees from small roasters around the US. To narrow down those 600 options from 60 roasters, you’ll complete a quiz on your coffee preferences, then choose a subscription that starts at $12.71/bag. Signing up for a larger subscription will snag you a discount—a dozen bags of coffee come at 15% off. Each bag is roasted to order and either arrives whole or ground. (The grind’s fineness is ideal for drip coffee.)
Similarly to Trade above, and Luna, Counter Culture, and Equator below, MistoBox places an emphasis on direct trade coffee—coffee with as short a supply chain as possible so that there are few (if any) middlemen between grower and roaster. There’s no regulating body (or even universal terminology!) within the industry for direct trade, and levels of transparency, sustainability, and, frankly, ethics can vary from roaster to roaster. Still, MistoBox does a good job of setting the bar above that of the mass coffee market. A few roasters on MistoBox to look out for in particular: Olympia Coffee and Onyx Coffee, both of which publish annual reports detailing how much they pay farmers for their beans.
Yes Plz co-founders Sumi Ali and Tony (Tonx) Konecny have been figures in the West Coast coffee world for years, with their collective careers spanning Victrola, Intelligentsia, and G&B. Their second venture together, Yes Plz, has stayed small and focused on one simple goal: to send out the very best coffee to home drinkers, plain and simple. There isn’t a breadth of options here. Actually, there are no options here, save for caf or decaf and frequency of shipments. One Yes Plz release goes out at a time—either blend or single-origin, all roasted in LA—and blends are never repeated twice. It’s the ideal coffee subscription for anyone who orders “bartender’s choice” at a cocktail bar. You won’t learn a ton about each bag when it arrives; this is a drinking experience, not an educational experience. We tried a blend using beans from Mexico, Peru, and Ethiopia called “Creamy Dreamy.” It smelled like an oat cappuccino, right out of the bag, and had a luscious, silky finish that made us wish we could reorder. Alas, sometimes the best things in life are fleeting.
If you break out into a cold sweat every time your eyes scan the tasting notes of various beans in the coffee aisle, try Driftaway Coffee. It’s the only coffee subscription service we’ve found that begins with a blind coffee tasting, which, besides serving as a fun game to play with your roommates, gives you the chance to sample five different flavor profiles in an unbiased setup. The box of color-coded, single-origin beans arrives with detailed instructions on how to taste on your own and select your favorite coffees. You then report your findings to Driftaway, who will log your flavor and roast preferences and curate your subscription accordingly. For those who’d like a little more intel, Driftaway hosts weekly cupping sessions, guided by a pro. The small, independent roaster, led by wife-and-husband duo Anu Menon and Suyog Mody, has an impressively wide roster of beans despite the company’s size—Driftaway roasts over 91 coffees from 26 different countries, with new coffees being introduced every month.
This Seattle-based company is another one of our top picks for multi-roaster coffee subscriptions. They have a huge variety of coffee, as well as coffee subscription options. Choose from a curator's selections (with a well-rounded variety of new and classic picks of the season); light and bright (with crisp acidity and fruit-forward flavors from a variety of origins); medium and cozy; dark and toasty; all espresso; and all-decaf. You can also, of course, subscribe to your own favorite blends on repeat.
Laidrey is a micro-roastery in Tarzana, California with a small-but-mighty subscription to match. There are a few more options here than Yes Plz (flavor choices are Light Roast, Medium Roast, Dark Roast, or Surprise Me) but still, the idea is that you’re putting your morning cup in the knowing hands of a coffee pro—in this case, Gacia Tachejian, who started roasting coffee out of her garage before serving coffee from a cart before moving on to her first brick-and-mortar and online shop. A biweekly subscription comes with information on the flavor profiles, farming methods, and farmers themselves.
If you're looking for a massive selection, take note of Crema. With more than 65 roasters and more than 1,000 coffee blends, there's no shortage of variety. Their lineup includes big-name roasters alongside up-and-comers. In addition to providing excellent coffee, Crema is big on education. They have tons of brew guides that teach you how to use different machines, explore different flavor profiles, and more.
This Chicago-based company of 28 years is one of the pioneers of direct trade coffee, which means not only have we loved every bag of Intelligentsia coffee we’ve ever tried, but we’ve also felt good about purchasing them. Choose from Intelligentsia’s Choice subscription ($21/12-oz. bag), which will send out a rotation of single-origin coffees on a delivery schedule that works for you, or customize your subscription by choosing your favorite blends.
Again, buying whole beans is the way to get the freshest cup of coffee at home. If you’re paying $19-plus for a bag, treat them kindly! Let them shine. Run ’em through the coffee grinder each morning. But if you really must, Intelligentsia does something handy here for preground coffee drinkers: They accommodate 11 different grind sizes. Chemex, Hario dripper, and even stovetop espresso are accounted for. The site provides quite a bit of hand-holding and each bag comes with brewing method suggestions and instructions, so you can really dial in your ideal cup even if you don’t have barista-level skills.
Counter Culture (a favorite of food director Chris Morocco) has storefronts in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, and New York, which double as coffee training centers that host cuppings and tastings. They believe in the “any coffee, any brew” idea, meaning it doesn’t specify which bags are best for espresso, or pour-over, etc.—although it does tend to roast the single-origin beans lighter to showcase their unique flavors, so you may want to steer clear for espresso. (We're partial to Big Trouble when we want something round and nutty in our espresso machine, for what it's worth.) Counter Culture’s subscription selection will walk you through flavor profiles of different beans and how many bags you’ll need (you can select four bags/week if that’s your thing). Each bag is roasted to order and always shipped whole bean.
Go Get Em' Tiger Coffee Subscription
This Los Angeles-based single roaster sources beans from Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kenya, Colombia, and Peru. Their selection is limited, but their standards are high: they roast really great coffee, so you can be confident that what you get will be good. It’s a little on the pricier side, but that not uncommon for at this tier of American roaster. If you're in the L.A. area, you can visit Go Get ‘Em Tiger’s physical locations (in Santa Monica, Los Feliz, Highland Park, West Hollywood, and Culver City) to get a taste of just how delicious their coffee is.
This Portland-based roaster has been around since 1999 and has quite a few blends to choose from. It stands out as one of the most affordable coffee subscriptions, but don't mistake the competitive price tag for a lesser quality blend—in our experience, their coffee is consistently good across the board. If want to get a taste of everything they offer, check out their Blend Shuffle subscription—it takes you on a tour of all their most iconic coffee blends.
One last old-timer in the direct trade coffee world: Equator. In 1995, the same year that Counter Culture was setting up shop in North Carolina and Intelligentsia was getting its start in Chicago, LGBTQ-owned Equator was founded across the country in Marin, California. If you’re an espresso drinker, you might like Equator’s 13 espresso options, available in a $17.50/bag subscription. For all other brewing methods, select from a single-origin or a blend curation, and let the team introduce you to new bags each week or month, depending on your preferred delivery frequency. Equator also teams up with chefs, including fellow Bay Area residents Dominique Crenn and Brandon Jew, to create specific blends that benefit various nonprofits.
When we opened our first bag of Onyx coffee, the aroma of fresh peaches and lavender hit me right in the nose, strong as a scented candle. This is the brand that redefined what fresh coffee means to me. The Arkansas-based coffee lab is committed to spotlighting its producers—on each coffee’s page, the company lists from whom it bought the coffee, exactly how much it cost, its cupping score, and its sustainability impact (the roastery runs entirely on solar power). Cofounder and 2020 US Barista Champion Andrea Allen is also committed to supporting women in the specialty coffee industry, as seen in her new “passion project,” the Doyenne subscription, a monthly shipment of a female-produced coffee that Allen curates herself. Each delivery includes a card detailing the producer’s story—the most recent batch comes from Marysabel Caballero, a third-generation producer in Marcala, Honduras—as well as detailed brewing instructions.
All of the beans we tasted from Onyx were light and fruity, but Onyx also offers one dark-as-midnight coffee, Eclipse, as well as some experimental varieties, like a Colombian coffee that’s co-fermented with grapes. The Roaster’s Choice is the brand’s most popular subscription, almost always featuring a new single-origin coffee that the team is particularly excited about. And for tea lovers, Onyx also offers a variety of tea subscriptions, sourced and curated with the same meticulous care as their coffee. Oh, and bean-to-bar chocolate.
If you’ve visited a New York City coffee shop, chances are you’ve tasted Partners coffee. Not only does the New York–based roastery have five locations across the city, but it wholesales beans to a slew of the cafés across the boroughs. A quick online quiz (which includes questions about your preferred flavor profile, brewing method of choice, and coffee experience level) will help you determine which blend is right for you. From the fruity, milky El Ramo to dark, brooding Manhattan, you’re sure to find a blend to commit to in one of the brand’s eight mainstays. Subscribing will score you 10% off as well as free shipping. But if you’re not into that level of commitment, the Roaster’s Choice subscription lets you enjoy a new single-origin or blend every 2 or 4 weeks. (Don’t sleep on the Rockaway Cold Brew Pouches, which make brewing your own cold brew so much easier—no grinding or straining required.)
If you exclusively drink iced coffee year-round (or, like me, switch to cold brew for the summer), Blue Bottle’s Cold Brew Assortment subscription is for you. With locations in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Japan, Blue Bottle is widely considered a herald of the third-wave coffee movement (it even sells its craft instant espresso with a cupping spoon), and in 2017, it was acquired by Nestlé. All the coffee is downright sublime, but the chicory-infused New Orleans–style cold brew has a special place in our heart. We used to spend an embarrassing amount of money on iced NOLAs at its New York location, but thanks to Blue Bottle’s subscription, we now make our own at home. The whole beans come with a pouch of ground chicory and a convenient recipe card. You don’t have to go the cold-brew route: The brand offers a slew of whole bean subscriptions as well as an instant coffee subscription.
Blue Bottle offers half-bag or full-bag shipments in most flavors (but not the NOLA-style, which only comes in a full bag. We’ll breeze through it all anyways).
If you’re counting down till Fat Gold’s November olive harvest, can rattle off where Diaspora’s spices are sourced from, and are a card-carrying member of Rancho Gordo’s bean club, you’ll love the Luna approach. The duo behind this tiny roaster (Laura Perry and Nate Welland) is known for their light, fruity blends and meticulously thoughtful sourcing. Our own resident coffee nerd, Chris Morocco, introduced me to Luna; he travels with a bag of its Techno Peach blend. Subscribe to Luna’s two bags a month program and you might very well end up spending an afternoon reading the included zine about the differences between Ethiopian and Guatemalan beans, all while sipping a subscriber exclusive blend. It is very much, as Perry puts it, “the weird and wonderful world of coffee nerddom,” but any ingredient-obsessive can hop on board.
The beans are roasted fresh each week, and subscriptions are shipped out directly after roasting. Subscribers can expect a mid-month shipment of two bags, along with the zine.
Bags of beans from Alma, a crop-to-cup coffee producer, can be purchased on both Trade and MistoBox. But if you’ve dated around and decided it’s time to go steady, Alma operates its own subscription service. Alma is certified USDA organic, cofounded by a disabled army veteran and a fifth-generation coffee farmer, and is solely responsible for every part of the glorious coffee process. Alma own its own farms in Honduras, where all their beans are grown before being sent to its roasting facility, HQ, and coffee shop in Canton, Georgia. Select from eight different types of coffee, including Alma’s classic blends, seasonally changing honey- and natural-process bags, a cold-brew option, and decaf. Bags are roasted to order, can be shipped whole or in one of three grind settings (Keurig, pour-over, French press). If you’re looking for a larger subscription, say, for your office, expect discounts up to 15% as you increase the number of bags sent per week.
Margaret Kemunto Nyamumbo grew up watching Western coffee companies pay dismal prices for the coffee from her grandfather’s farms in Kenya. Now her California-based company Kahawa 1893 sources all of its high-quality beans directly from female Kenyan and Rwandan farmers, all of whom are paid above industry standards. (Women make up 90% of the coffee farming labor force in Africa with only a 1% ownership stake, explains Nyamumbo.) From there, the beans are sent to San Francisco, where they are roasted twice a week and shipped immediately. Nyamumbo recommends allowing light roast coffee to rest for seven days post-roasting for peak flavor—or, two or so days after it arrives—and a few days longer for naturally processed beans. (Naturally processed coffee, sometimes also called dry processed or unwashed, is dried for weeks in the sun before the beans are removed from the pulpy outer layer. That extra time together usually means a fruitier, brighter flavor than that of washed coffee.)
Subscriptions can be made up of one of Kahawa 1893’s single origins and blends on repeat or a rotating selection of beans with the Roaster’s Choice sampler subscription. Either way, you can choose from whole or ground beans. If you go for ground coffee beans, know that it will ship as a medium grind, best suited to automatic drip machines or pour-over. If you’re on the go a lot, scoop up the single serving to-go coffee packs, which steep like tea, for a quick fix in a pinch. And for those who just want the (very) occasional cup, Kahawa 1893 subscription options start at just one 12-ounce bag every 60 days.
“We started Origin Roasted Coffee with the idea that we can deliver better tasting coffee roasted at origin, for a better price, while doing it more sustainably” says Eduardo Umaña, cofounder of Origin Roasted Coffee. Each bag of OR that we’ve tried has been bright, fruity, and vibrant. Umaña explains that what I’m tasting is in large part due to the fact that OR's green coffee is fresher than much of what makes it to the States for roasting. Origin Roasted keeps coffee seeds either at the farm where they are grown or as near as possible in ideal conditions, and then roasts them quickly to maintain the vibrancy and flavor complexity that is often lost in storage before roasting. (Coffee that’s been stored for a long time before roasting is called Past Crop Coffee; Quintal has a useful explainer here.) This also cuts out a whole slew of middlemen—exporters, importers, roasters, and retailers—and allows Origin Roasted to pay “at least 100% more” to its Latin American farmers, according to the brand. While the bean selection rotates, overall, Origin Roasted is bright and fruit-forward; we found it best suited for someone who prefers the nuance and zip of lighter roast coffee.
By Bon Appétit Contributor
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