Cartwheel Coffee coffee bagsBrand review · 3 min read

Cartwheel Coffee coffee review

What Cartwheel Coffee sells, what it costs against the rest of the market, and who should buy it.

Updated 3 September 2026Written by the We Try Coffee team

Cartwheel Coffee sells 17 coffees in the UK and the cheapest comes out at 43p a cup, which is less than most of the ground coffee we track. Cheap coffee is easy to find and hard to trust, so the useful question is not whether it is cheap. It is what the range actually contains, and whether the bag doing the heavy lifting is the one you would want.

Short answer

A light roast with real acidity, best drunk black, for remarkably little money.

Cheaper than 93% of the ground coffee we track

Tastes
Fruity and sweet, lighter bodied
Strength
Mild to medium
Best for
Filter and pour-over
Valuecup price vs the format median
5/5
Easy to likefrom the roast profile
5/5
Good for beginnersblend, roast and pack size
3/5
Cheapest cup£0.43across 17 products
Against the market−39%vs the ground median
Two cups a day£6.05a week, £3.84 less than typical
Mostly roastedMedium-lightfruit, sweet

Buy it ifyou finish a 1kg bag inside six weeks

Skip it ifyou are chasing a named farm or origin

What kind of roaster this is

Cartwheel Coffee sells whole bean and ground in the UK, and we track 17 of their coffees, in 1kg.

94% of the Cartwheel Coffee range we can classify is blended. Blending has a bad name it does not deserve; it is how a roaster keeps a coffee tasting like itself when the harvest behind it changes, and it is the reason your regular bag is still your regular bag in January. The buying reaches 10 countries across the range, which is a wide book for a brand this size. The roasting spans 3 of our five levels, so there is a genuine choice to make inside the range rather than one house style applied to everything. 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.

Formats and origins

What Cartwheel Coffee sources and sells. Each one is a live filter across every brand we track.

What Cartwheel Coffee coffee costs

The range runs from 37p to 97p a cup across 17 products. That is a 2.6× spread inside a single brand, which is why "is Cartwheel Coffee expensive" is the wrong question; the right one is which bag you pick. The cheapest is The Bagel Project Blend in the 1kg, and the dearest is Jairo Arcila in the 1kg.

Cartwheel Coffee range, cheapest per cup first
ProductFormatSizePer cupPer kg
The Bagel Project Blend1kg£0.37£20.50
District Blendground1kg£0.43£24.00
Elisabete Martins1kg£0.66£36.50
Misspent Youthground1kg£0.69£38.50
Legomanground1kg£0.70£39.00
Huila Reserveground1kg£0.72£40.00
Butureground1kg£0.76£42.00
Nery Pabloground1kg£0.81£45.00
Migoti Hillground1kg£0.81£45.00
Jinotegaground1kg£0.85£47.00
Gakenkeground1kg£0.86£48.00
Mbare Naturalground1kg£0.86£48.00

Bags themselves run £20.50 to £54.00. 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 Cartwheel Coffee, buy District Blend. At 43p a cup it comes in around 39% under the median for ground coffee, and that is measured against every brand in our catalogue rather than against Cartwheel Coffee'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?
  • Cartwheel Coffee£0.43 per cup£315
  • Typical ground£0.71 per cup, our median£516

At 2 cups a day, Cartwheel Coffee costs £200 less a year than the typical ground coffee we track. That is the same coffee habit, bought better.

How Cartwheel Coffee tastes

We have not tasted Cartwheel Coffee, 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 Cartwheel Coffee 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 want to choose their own roast rather than take the roaster's word for it, since the range covers 3 of our five levels.

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. Cartwheel Coffee clears it comfortably on at least one product, which more brands fail than pass. Worth knowing that the saving is concentrated in the larger bags rather than spread evenly, so buying the small size gives most of it back.

Cartwheel Coffee 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 Cartwheel Coffee, and the comparison hubs will put all of them on the same per-cup basis if you want to go wider.

Coffees priced like Cartwheel Coffee

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.