The fuel for every great coffee geeks hero's day, is a fresh supply of tasty beans.
With a great coffee subscription, you'll be signing up for new and exciting coffees to try out throughout the year.
... it's like a new little surprise gift every month!
But with so many coffee subscriptions to choose from, how do you find the right one for the hero in your life?
Here's our quick tips to help you dial in your gift giving this season.
1. Variety Vs Consistency
Figure out if your coffee hero has a "go to" bag of beans that they routinely get.
If so, many roasters will offer subscriptions of a particular coffee, so one option would be to go with that and get a subscription of the coffee you know they enjoy.
On the other hand, if you want to give the gift of a new surprise every month, a changing coffee subscription would be the way to go.
With these constantly changing subscriptions, roasters will send out a new coffee every time.
This way, you always receive fresh, in season and exciting coffees.
Our subscriptions, for example, are all set up like this, and we'll often share new release coffees with subscribers first before they go up for general release.
2. Honing It In
Does your coffee hero have a particular origin that you know they enjoy?
Are there any countries that you know they often look for?
If so, many roasters (us included) offer regional based subscriptions.
With these subscriptions, the coffees are usually different every month, but they're always from a particular area (i.e. Central America, Africa etc).
Some roasters will even offer more specific options than that, with an Ethiopia subscription for example. But just know that the more specific you go with it, the more limited you'll be in the variety of coffees you'll receive. Again, as we covered above, that could be a good thing or a bad thing, it all depends on what you're looking for.
Aside from that, you can also take a look at some of the coffees you see them buying and enjoying, and see if you can spot any common patterns in the flavour notes.
Do they often lean toward chocolatey/nutty flavours for example? Or fruity flavour notes like berries? Knowing what typical flavours they enjoy can also help you zero in on the best coffee subscription for them.
If you often see them enjoying fruity and/or acidity forward coffees then an African coffee subscription will likely be right up their street.
On the other hand, if you know they are more chocolatey, nutty, lower acidity focused then a South or Central American coffee subscription is where you'll want to be.
3. Choosing A Delivery Schedule
You might see a few different options here as you start to look around at subscription options.
Sometimes you'll see delivery options for once per month, sometimes every 2 weeks, and sometimes even more frequently than that.
To choose what's best for your hero, we need to talk quickly about roast level, i.e. light roast, medium roast, dark roast etc.
There's a common misconception in coffee that fresher is better.
That makes for great marketing campaigns, but in reality it isn't strictly true.
We'll save you from the very geeky details of how and why that's the case, but what you need to know is that light roasts need time to "rest" after roasting, in order to taste are their best when brewed.
The darker the roast, the less "rest" time is needed.
So if you're looking at a subscription that's more medium or dark roast profiles, then 2 weekly delivery might make sense here, to ensure your beans are arriving at their peak.
But if you're looking at a lighter roast subscription, a lot of times those beans will want to rest for at least a couple of weeks and sometimes longer.
So for lighter roasted subscriptions (all of our subscriptions fall into this category, for example) a monthly delivery schedule works well.
4. If In Doubt, Ask Your Roaster
Choosing a gift for a coffee lover can be a little intimidating, and often overwhelming.
We hope this blog post has helped to answer some of those questions and give you a better idea of what to look for.
But the easiest and best thing to do if you're still unsure, is to reach out to your roaster and ask them which of their subscriptions they would recommend.
Tell them as much as you can when you reach out, and they'll be happy to help guide you in the right direction.
Feel free to shoot us a message over on the contact page and we'll get back to you ASAP.
