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Brand review · 3 min readAlchemy coffee review
What Alchemy sells, what it costs against the rest of the market, and who should buy it.
Alchemy asks 68p a cup at its cheapest, which is more than most ground coffee we list. Plenty of brands charge that and are worth it. The question is what you get for the difference, so here is the range, what it costs against everything else, and where we would put the money.
Short answer
Easy-drinking coffee with caramel and chocolate about it, at the going rate.
Cheaper than 57% of the ground coffee we track
- Tastes
- Balanced, caramel and chocolate
- Strength
- Medium
- Best for
- Everyday coffee, black or white
- Valuecup price vs the format median
- 3/5
- Easy to likefrom the roast profile
- 5/5
- Good for beginnersblend, roast and pack size
- 4/5
Cheapest cup£0.68across 5 products
Against the market−3%vs the ground median
Two cups a day£9.58a week, £0.31 less than typical
Mostly roastedMediumcaramel, balanced
Buy it ifyou finish a 1kg bag inside six weeks
Skip it ifChimney Fire Coffee at 68p would do
What kind of roaster this is
Alchemy sells whole bean and ground in the UK, and we track 5 of their coffees, in 1kg.
Expect blends here rather than named farms: 100% of the classified range is blended. The trade is a familiar one. You give up the story on the label and you get a cup that does not drift between orders. The roasting sits on just 2 of our five levels, so this is a range with a house style rather than a spread to pick from. Every bag we list is a kilo or more, which is what pushes the per-cup figure down and also what makes this a bad fit if you drink slowly, since coffee is past its best four to six weeks after roasting. Colombia turns up in 40% of the range, so it is fair to call that the backbone of what they buy. Decaf is 20% of the range, which is unusually well served; most brands treat it as an afterthought.
Formats and origins
What Alchemy sources and sells. Each one is a live filter across every brand we track.
What Alchemy coffee costs
The range runs from 68p to £1.17 a cup across five products. That is a 1.7× spread inside a single brand, which is why "is Alchemy expensive" is the wrong question; the right one is which bag you pick. The cheapest is Colombia Popayan Reserve Decaf in the 1kg, and the dearest is Colombia in the 1kg.
| Product | Format | Size | Per cup | Per kg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Colombia Popayan Reserve Decaf | ground | 1kg | £0.68 | £38.00 |
| Uganda Bukonzo Dream | ground | 1kg | £0.74 | £41.00 |
| Kenya Nandi AB | ground | 1kg | £0.77 | £43.00 |
| Ethiopia Bette Buna | ground | 1kg | £0.95 | £53.00 |
| Colombia | whole bean | 1kg | £1.17 | £65.00 |
Bags themselves run £38.00 to £65.00. Ignore that column. A bigger bag costs more and almost always costs less per cup, which is the only number that follows you home.
The one to buy
If you buy one thing from Alchemy, buy Colombia Popayan Reserve Decaf. At 68p a cup it comes in around 3% under the median for ground coffee, and that is measured against every brand in our catalogue rather than against Alchemy's own list prices. Nothing else in the range gets close on that test.
What that costs over a year
How much coffee do you drink?
- Alchemy£0.68 per cup£499
- Typical ground£0.71 per cup, our median£516
At 2 cups a day, Alchemy costs £16 less a year than the typical ground coffee we track. That is the same coffee habit, bought better.
How Alchemy tastes
We have not tasted Alchemy, so we are not going to invent a tasting note. A flavour score we did not earn would be worth less than none, and this section would be the easiest place on the site to quietly make one up. What we can show you is measured: where every coffee in the range sits on our own five-point roast scale, and which origins go into it. Roast is the strongest single predictor of whether a cup arrives bright and fruity or dark and chocolatey, so it is the closest honest answer to what this brand is like to drink.
How Alchemy roasts
Every coffee standardised onto our own five-point scale rather than the roaster's. Read these as tendencies: origin, process and how you brew all move the cup.
Who it suits
- People who found something they like and want it to taste the same next year, which is what a blend is for.
- Households getting through real volume. The kilo bags are the whole value case, and they only work if you drink them fresh.
- People who already know they like a medium roast, because that is essentially all there is here.
Is it good value?
Our test is simple, and it is the same one we apply to everything: cost per cup against the median for the same format. Alchemy lands around the middle. It is not the cheapest way to a cup of coffee, and the money above the median buys convenience and consistency rather than a smaller bill. Whether that is a fair trade is genuinely your call, not ours.
Alchemy products we track
Cheapest per cup first, with live prices.
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.
What else to consider
No brand is worth buying without knowing what sits next to it on price. These are the closest ground coffees we track to Alchemy, and the comparison hubs will put all of them on the same per-cup basis if you want to go wider.
Coffees priced like Alchemy
The closest ground coffees on price per cup, from brands we also track. If one of these is cheaper for the same thing, that is worth knowing before you order.
Compare against the market
Keep reading
PricesAlchemy price guideEvery bag priced per cup and per kilo, with the cheapest route to each one.BrandAll Alchemy pricesLive prices on all 5 products, cheapest cup first.CompareEvery ground coffeeAll 483 of them on one per-cup basis, filterable by roast and origin.ReviewChimney Fire Coffee reviewThe closest brand to Alchemy on price, at 68p a cup.OffersToday's best valueEverything currently priced well under the median for its own format.