Coffee subscriptions offer a wonderful way to experience the joy of making delicious, well-considered coffee at home. Whatever style you’re looking for, subscription services offer a broad range of options from near and far, each uniquely able to satisfy a role in the home coffee arsenal. Some of us use home coffee subscriptions to provide a reliable, daily drinker. Others look at coffee subscriptions as a path to explore the outer reaches of flavor and taste. And for others it’s a fine mix in-between, or a way to dive deep on one particular roaster’s style and expertise.
Below I’ve assembled a crack list of outstanding coffee subscriptions that fulfill a broad range of taste and styles. Each of these subscriptions has been bench-tested by the team at Sprudge personally over the last several years, helping support our work publishing the world’s most popular coffee publication. Which, believe me, requires that we drink quite a lot of coffee.
I hope you come away from this with a new set of ideas and options to find the coffee subscription that’s right for you. And remember: coffee subscriptions make an incredible gift, quite literally serving as “the gift that keeps on giving” all year long.
The best entry level coffee subscription — Yes Plz “The Mix” — buy it here
For me, LA-based roaster Yes Plz has created a sort of proof-of-concept for what a coffee subscription can be. “The Mix” is astonishingly good; I’ve been a subscriber for several years now, and my wife and I get a little nervous each week when we start to run low. When the envelope arrives with a fresh weekly version of Yes Plz’s ever-changing house blend, there’s a little sigh of relief breathed throughout the Michelman household. And I love that it comes with a unique weekly risograph print containing notes on the blend, music listening suggestions, and a paragraph or two of exposition from Tony Konecny’s, the brand’s co-founder and a longtime coffee industry expert.
Every week the blend is different, but not *too* different—and I love that. It’s a comforting, dependable daily driver, always great first thing in the morning, and ideal for someone like me who is trying lots of different coffees over the course of a given week. I’m brewing this coffee up every morning in my Technivorm Moccamaster. “The Mix” loves a mindful batch brew set-up at home, but you can absolutely brew this in the style of your choice, and the brand offers a couple of other options in case you’re looking specifically for home espresso or single origin options.
The best decaf coffee subscription — Swiss Water Decaf Curated Subscription — buy it here
The decaf coffee experts at Swiss Water offer this absolutely fantastic subscription option, which is available in a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly cadence. The service draws on Swiss Water’s world class roster of roaster partners, which means that in a given week you could receive coffees from brands like Cafe Grumpy, Demitasse, Equator Coffees, Kuma Coffee, Three Keys Coffee, or any of the dozens of other top brands Swiss Water works with as a decaffeination partner.
There’s nothing else quite like this on the market, and Swiss Water’s decades of expertise and knowledge in the field of decaf puts you in the right hands. You never have to settle for flat decaf again.
The best coffee subscription for home espresso — La Marzocco Home Espresso Subscription — buy it here
La Marzocco helped revolutionize the field of home espresso enjoyment when it introduced the iconic Linea Mini espresso machine, a flagship in the “handmade in Florence” brand’s lineup of home espresso machines. Then they did it again with the La Marzocco Linea Micra. But with all that firepower on your home kitchen counter, you’ll need some delicious espresso to pull.
Fortunately the La Marzocco Home team has you covered with its innovative Home Espresso Subscription. LM’s long standing relationship as the espresso machine of choice for the world’s finest roasters and coffee bars gives it enviable access to outstanding roasted coffee, and they’ve parlayed that into a helpful recurring subscription offer to elevate your home coffee game. I think it’s especially cool to see how this program has helped expose and amplify the work of outstanding small roasters like Airship Coffee, Wonderstate Coffee, Deadstock Coffee, and Idle Hands; this subscription isn’t just great coffee every month, it’s a discovery engine, and it might just turn you on to your new favorite roaster along the way.
The best Nordic coffee subscription — Kaffebox — buy it here
“Nordic roast coffee” generally refers to coffee that’s been roasted a touch lighter during the coffee roasting process, yielding flavors that may strike some as more tea-like, or fruity. It’s gone through waves of popularity in the American coffee roasting community over the last decade, but in Scandinavia it’s not a trend—it’s simply how things are done, often with surprisingly delicious results.
There are hundreds and hundreds of small independent roasters scattered across Northern Europe, and so some curation and discovery help is most welcome when exploring the world of fine Nordic coffees. This is where Kaffebox excels: each month they curate the very best Nordic-style coffee roasters and ship them to your home, wherever that happens to be in the world. Some months you might get coffee from a brand that’s pretty well known in the specialty coffee world, like Coffee Collective or Tim Wendelboe, but other months it’ll be a total discovery, like Standout Coffee of Stockholm, or Mjosen Kaffe, which comes from a tiny town called Tamar on a lake north of Oslo. I write about coffee for a living and I have learned a ton about tiny Scandinavian roasters by drinking Kaffebox.
The subscription’s popular Advent Calendar offering is just about to go live, especially if you’re shopping subscriptions with gifting in mind.
The Best International Coffee Subscription — Kumquat Coffee “KQ Coffee Club” — buy it here
Kumquat Coffee’s takes the LA-based brand’s kaleidoscopic approach to sourcing roasters from around the world and simplifies it for your pleasure. The company’s in-house tasting committee selects one or two coffees per month from dozens of options, featuring a different international roaster each time. This is then shipped straight to your door, along with an exclusive coupon code in case you’d like to buy more coffee from that roaster directly.
This is one of the only places in America you can find coffee from obscure, tiny Korean brands like Cafe Doan or Hocus Pocus, and other top international roasters like Fritz Coffee, April Coffee, Lot 61, and Knotted. There’s always something new to discover with Kumquat, and if you live outside of Los Angeles—away from Kumquat’s growing collection of truly outstanding coffee bars—this is a wonderful way to still feel connected to the special work they do.
A coffee subscription for true coffee experts and/or coffee geeks — Dayglow Coffee “Discovery” — buy it here
Dayglow Coffee does a lot of things really well. They operate some of the most interesting coffee bars in the country, for starters, with locations in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Brooklyn. And they’ve come on quite strong as a roaster, offering their unique Dayglow and Rareglow lines of coffee with compelling results. But the original hook for Dayglow was always its approach to maximalist mule-roaster offerings, sourcing the very finest coffees in the world from an eclectic and ever-changing cadre of roasters from roasters like Dak, Uncommon, Friedhats, and many, many more.
It’s hard to understate just how influential Dayglow has been—they almost single-handedly made the multi-roaster model cool again, after it had all been declared dead in the late 2010s, and they’ve done it while also innovating on the roasting front, creating a cohesive ecosystem of coffees from around the world that compliment their own roasted offerings, and vice-versa. A Discovery subscription brings this all together, letting you sample Dayglow’s own coffees alongside fine coffees from other roasters. There is literally no one on the coffee drinking earth who would not enjoy this subscription, including you there, reading this right now.
A few of our favorite roasters that offer subscriptions — multiple options
One of my personal favorite aspects of the coffee subscription is its unique ability to help you really dig in and get to know the work of an outstanding individual roaster. I love the intimacy and ongoing relationship it helps build for me as a coffee drinker; when you team up with a roaster that really cares, there’s no better way than a coffee subscription to truly get to know their full range of coffee expressions.
Just a few of my personal favorite roaster subscriptions include Joe Coffee Company (NYC), The Barn (Berlin), Dune Coffee Roasters (Santa Barbara), Equator Coffees (Bay Area), Madcap Coffee (Grand Rapids), Night Swim Coffee (Charlotte, NC), Olympia Coffee (Olympia, Washington), Partners Coffee (Brooklyn), and Verve Coffee (Santa Cruz), to name just a few.
These roasters and many more are featured regularly in the Sprudge Roaster’s Village program, which curates weekly coffee offerings from the finest roasters in the specialty coffee industry. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to never miss one of these weekly curated coffee offerings.
Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge.
