The Best Coffee Is the Kind That Shows Up at Your Door Every Week

There are two kinds of coffee subscription providers: roasters and retailers.

Roasters are cafés, and small-batch producers who buy raw beans from farmers all over the world and roast them to perfection. By buying from a roaster, you’re directly supporting the people who make your favorite coffees; there’s no middleman between you and your coffee. The downside is you usually won’t have as broad a selection available. Roasters usually sell only their own coffee, but that often means special blends and single origins are available from a roaster that you can’t get from a retailer. Your local roaster down the street may also have subscription offers, giving you the chance to buy local without leaving your house—and offten catch a discount.

Retailers are coffee subscription providers who buy their beans from many different roasters, then ship bags of coffee to you. A multi-roaster retailer will often have a much broader selection of high-quality coffee available (from multiple brands) to ship to your doorstep—often selected and curated carefully by coffee experts. The downside on some subscriptions is that you’re not buying directly from a roaster, which means the coffee may not be as fresh. (That’s where this guide comes in, we can tell you how fresh they are because we always test each one and take note of the roast dates on each coffee bag.)

Both roasters and retailers sell great coffee. This guide contains a mix of both.

These subscription services all produce killer coffee beans, and they all taste great. But if you can get great coffee roasted locally delivered to you, do it. Look up your local coffee roasters, or visit your favorite coffee shop and ask where they get their beans. Ordering locally helps minimize the environmental impact of coffee, which, let’s be honest, is pretty big. It’s a fun way to explore when you’re traveling, too. The best coffee you can find is often the cup you drink when you’re on the road, in a new place, tasting something new. Even if you don’t live on the road, it’s fun to explore different shops when you do travel.

To test these subscriptions, we tried a variety of beans from each service, both our own picks and any curated options. We brewed each bag in different ways to see which beans were best suited to which brewing method. Over subscriptions he tested, Scott Gilbertson covered the spectrum of grinds with espresso, moka pot, French press, pour over, and Turkish or cowboy coffee. Matthew Korfhage wanders through espresso, AeroPress, drip, cold brew, pour-over, and a wealth of somewhat unclassifiable devices.

It’s worth doing the same if you have access to different brewing methods, especially if you opt for a subscription that offers a lot of variety. A roast that makes a great shot of espresso does not necessarily make the best pour-over coffee, and vice versa. Some roasters, like the excellent Equator Coffee, offer one subscription specifically for espresso, one for decaf, and another for light single origin roasts that lend themselves to drip and pour-over. It can also be rewarding to take notes on your favorites. Some of these services offer a way to do this on the site, which is handy, though a paper notebook works well enough. If you’d like some more pointers on brewing, be sure to read our guide to brewing better coffee at home.

A delivery coffee subscription service often does offer discounts on shipping or the base cost of each bag, as compared to buying single bags for delivery. But usually, subscriptions will be premium coffee, so it won’t be as cheap as the less-fresh, often pre-ground coffee from your grocery store.

But if you’re the sort who likes to try the best freshly roasted single-origin Ethiopian or Guatamalan coffee from roasters all over the country? This is where coffee subscriptions shine. You’re also often getting the best speciality bags a roaster has to offer, or a curated selection from a certified Q-grader—meaning you’re a lot more likely to find new coffees you wouldn’t have come across on your own.

I have no dearth of local roasters that I love to support. My home of Portland, Oregon, is perhaps the densest home to craft coffee in the country: Heart, Coava, Stumptown, Roseline, the home of the Specialty Coffee Association, multiple national coffee publications, and a craft coffee festival. I’ve been writing about coffee in Portland and elsewhere for more than a decade.

But a coffee subscription gives me access to coffees from all over the country and world. It’s a mix of ease and adventure, and a chance to be a barista at my own home multi-roaster cafe. I enjoy that I can get fresh-roasted beans from a coffee farm in Guatemala who roasts their own impossibly fresh beans on-site, alongside world-famous beans from other farmers right down the road—or taking a world tour each month with beans from our favorite globe-hopping subscription, Atlas Coffee Club.

But for others, a coffee subscription is just a way to get a steady drip of their favorite bag from their favorite roaster, guaranteed to arrive every week or every two weeks. Simple convenience is its own form of worth it.