Buying coffee beans online: roasters, subscriptions and freshness

A coffee bought online is a coffee you cannot smell, hold or see through the valve. Everything you know about it comes from the roaster’s own page. The good news is that a roaster’s page tells you a great deal, including what it leaves out.

This guide names no shops. It is about reading any of them.

What the roaster’s site should tell you

When it roasts, and when it ships. The best sign on a coffee site is a plain sentence such as “we roast on Monday and Thursday and ship the same day”. It means the roaster thinks about freshness as a schedule, not a slogan. Roast to order is the strongest version: your bag is roasted after you pay for it. A roaster that roasts weekly and ships from stock is fine too, as long as the roast date goes on the bag.

A roast date on the bag. Not a “best before”, not a “packed on”. The day the coffee came out of the drum. If the site does not say so, ask before ordering. How to read a bag of coffee explains why it is the first line to read.

Origin detail. Country, region, then farm, cooperative or washing station. Altitude, variety, process, harvest. Each step of precision means the roaster knows which lot this is. A page that says “Colombia, medium roast” is not lying; it is just telling you very little.

The producer. Better roasters name who grew the coffee and some publish what they paid for it, per kilogram of green coffee or as a multiple of the market price. That is a strong signal, because nobody publishes a number they are embarrassed by. Who gets paid for your coffee covers why the figure matters.

A brew suggestion. “Roasted for filter” or “roasted for espresso” is more useful than any tasting note. Many roasters roast the same lot two ways. If yours does not say, the roast level and the notes are the clue, and choosing beans for your method does the matching.

What a kilogram should cost

Bags come in 200 g, 227 g (eight ounces), 250 g, 340 g (twelve ounces) and 1 kg. The only fair comparison is price per kilogram. Divide the bag price by the weight in kilograms: a 250 g bag at €9 is €36 per kilogram, and a 340 g bag at $18 is about $53.

Prices vary by country, by year and by the green coffee market, which has been volatile. Treat the bands below as approximate European prices for whole beans, there to tell you whether an offer is in the normal range rather than to set a target.

Kind of coffee	Roughly, per kg
Supermarket whole bean	€10 to €20
A good roaster’s everyday blend	€25 to €40
Single origin, named lot	€35 to €60
Rare lots, Gesha, competition coffee	€80 and well beyond

Two things follow. Specialty coffee at home is still cheap per cup: at €35 per kilogram, a 15 g filter costs about 50 cents. And the cheapest bag on a roaster’s site is often its best value, because the everyday blend is the product they sell the most of and cannot afford to get wrong.

Bag size against how much you drink

Coffee is at its best for a few weeks after it has rested. Buy a size you will finish in that window. That needs one number: grams per day.

You drink	Grams per day	250 g lasts	1 kg lasts
One filter, 15 g	15 g	about 16 days	about 9 weeks
Two double espressos, 18 g each	36 g	about 7 days	about 4 weeks
Two people, two filters each	60 g	about 4 days	about 17 days

One person on one filter a day should buy 250 g at a time. A 1 kg bag would sit open for two months, well past its best. A household on espresso goes through a kilogram in a month and saves noticeably per kilogram by buying it.

If the 1 kg price is tempting and the arithmetic says otherwise, freeze it (see below) rather than leaving it open on the counter.

Subscriptions

A subscription sends coffee on a schedule, often with shipping included and a small discount per bag.

For. You never run out. Shipping costs are spread. A rotating selection is the cheapest way to taste a lot of origins without choosing each one. The roaster plans its roasting around subscribers, so the coffee tends to be fresh.

Against. The schedule does not know you. A fortnightly 250 g bag for someone who drinks 20 g a day piles up, and a pile of coffee is a pile of ageing coffee. A “roaster’s choice” may be a light washed coffee in a week you wanted something for milk. Some subscriptions are easy to pause and some hide the button.

Set the frequency from the grams per day table, not from the default on the page. Choose the filter or espresso option if there is one. And check, before paying, that you can skip a delivery in two clicks.

Shipping and resting

Coffee in the post is not wasted time. A bag roasted on Monday, posted on Tuesday and delivered on Thursday is three days off roast, which is roughly when filter coffee starts to be ready. For espresso it still wants another week on the shelf, unopened. Resting coffee after roasting has the table by roast and method.

The practical rule: order filter coffee when you have about a week left of the current bag, and espresso coffee when you have two. Ordering on Friday from a roaster that ships on Monday adds three days you did not plan for.

No grinder yet

Buying online without a grinder is fine. Most roasters grind to order and ask for the method: espresso, moka, filter, French press. Choose the method you actually use. Then buy 250 g at a time and finish each bag within two weeks or so, because ground coffee loses its aroma in days. Whole bean or ground explains what you lose and where it matters least (moka pot and French press, more than espresso).

If a grinder is coming, switch to whole bean the week it arrives. It is the largest single improvement available for the price.

Buying in bulk and freezing

Free shipping above a threshold is designed to make you buy more than you need. If you take the bait, freeze.

Split the bulk bag into airtight portions of about a week each as soon as it arrives. Freeze them. Take one out at a time, let it reach room temperature before opening, and never put it back. Freezing also pauses the rest, so an espresso roast that needed a week still needs most of it, before or after the freezer. The detail is in storing coffee at home. Do not use the fridge.

Red flags

• No roast date anywhere. On the bag or on the page. This is the one that ends the visit.
• Only a “best before”. Often twelve months or more after packing, and it tells you nothing about when the coffee was roasted.
• “100% arabica” as the main claim. It rules out robusta and nothing else. Most commodity coffee is arabica, and so is most bad coffee. A roaster with something better to say says it.
• “Specialty”, “premium” or “artisan” with no origin detail. The words are not audited on the bag. What specialty coffee actually means explains why the label does less work than it seems to.
• Eight tasting notes for one coffee. That is copywriting. Three specific notes are a description.
• Very dark, oily beans sold “for filter”. Oil on the surface means a long roast, and oily beans stale faster.
• Large discounts on single origins near the end of their season. Sometimes a bargain. Check the roast date before you assume it.

None of these proves the coffee is bad. Each one means you have to trust the roaster more than it has given you reason to.