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Coffee brands · 1 min readNew coffee brands to try, and how to judge one
There are more UK roasters than anyone can drink through. Here is how to pick a new one without gambling £14 on a bag.
Trying a new brand is the most enjoyable and least efficient thing you can do with a coffee budget. The trick is to make each attempt cheap and informative rather than expensive and random — which mostly comes down to what you look for before you buy.
Four things that tell you a roaster is serious
- A roast date on the bag, not just a best-before. This is the strongest single signal there is.
- Named origin and process — farm or co-operative, region, washed or natural — rather than "premium arabica".
- A recommended brew method and dose. Roasters who taste their own coffee tell you how they made it.
- A sensible size range. Somebody selling only 250g bags at a premium is selling you packaging as much as coffee.
Awards, medals and "world's best" claims on packaging are worth close to nothing. Roast date is worth more than all of them combined.
Where new brands usually price themselves
New independent roasters tend to land at 30p to 60p per cup — two to three times supermarket blends. That is not a scam; small batches and 250g bags genuinely cost more per kilo to produce. But it does mean a new brand has to be noticeably better to justify itself, and the only way to find out is to buy the cheapest bag they sell.
A cheap way to try several
- Buy the smallest bag, not the sampler. Samplers cost more per gram and give you too little of each to learn anything.
- Brew it the way you normally brew, not the way the bag suggests, at least once.
- Compare it against something you already know at a similar price per cup.
- Only commit to a large bag on the second purchase.
Brands we currently track
Priced per cup, cheapest first.
Prices are the last we fetched and can move. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases — it never changes the order, which is always cheapest per cup first.