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.
- Price: $9/6-oz. bag, $14/12-oz. bag
- Delivery frequency: every 2 or 4 weeks
- Our go-to order: The selection rotates, but the Colombia roast—with notes of toasted graham cracker and marshmallow—is a definite highlight
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.
- Price: starting at $12.71/bag
- Delivery frequency: every 1–4 weeks
- Our go-to order: Personalized coffee subscription
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.
- Price: $23/12-oz. bag, with free shipping
- Delivery frequency: every 1–4 weeks
- Our go-to order: The Mix, a weekly rotating subscription where no blend is repeated twice
