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Brand review · 3 min readCoaltown coffee review
What Coaltown sells, what it costs against the rest of the market, and who should buy it.
Coaltown asks 63p a cup at its cheapest, which is more than most pods 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
Weekday capsules for people who want the cup, not the ritual, priced about where you would expect.
Cheaper than 32% of the pods coffee we track
- Tastes
- Balanced, caramel and chocolate
- Strength
- Medium
- Best for
- Quick weekday cups
- Valuecup price vs the format median
- 2/5
- Easy to likefrom the roast profile
- 5/5
- Good for beginnersblend, roast and pack size
- 5/5
Cheapest cup£0.63across 14 products
Against the market+21%vs the pods median
Two cups a day£8.75a week at its cheapest
Mostly roastedMediumcaramel, balanced
Buy it ifyour machine takes these capsules
Skip it ifHalo Coffee 2018 at 63p would do
What kind of roaster this is
Coaltown sells whole bean, ground and pods in the UK, and we track 14 of their coffees, in 10 pods and 1kg.
79% of the Coaltown 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 8 countries across the range, which is a wide book for a brand this size. 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.
Formats and origins
What Coaltown sources and sells. Each one is a live filter across every brand we track.
What Coaltown coffee costs
The range runs from 63p to £1.80 a cup across 14 products. That is a 2.9× spread inside a single brand, which is why "is Coaltown expensive" is the wrong question; the right one is which bag you pick. The cheapest is Black Gold No.3 in the 10 pods, and the dearest is Unearthed Vol 3 in the 1kg.
| Product | Format | Size | Per cup | Per kg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Black Gold No.3 | pods | 10 pods | £0.63 | — |
| Jenkin Jones Decaf No.5 | pods | 10 pods | £0.68 | — |
| Black Gold No.3 | — | 1kg | £0.70 | £38.75 |
| Fazenda Do Salto | — | 1kg | £0.70 | £39.00 |
| Anthracite No.2 | pods | 10 pods | £0.72 | — |
| El Jaragual | — | 1kg | £0.81 | £45.00 |
| The Union No.4 | ground | 1kg | £0.81 | £45.00 |
| Drifft Half Caff No.6 | — | 1kg | £0.81 | £45.25 |
| Jenkin Jones Decaf No.5 | — | 1kg | £0.81 | £45.25 |
| Cyahinda | — | 1kg | £0.85 | £47.50 |
| Anthracite No.2 | — | 1kg | £0.88 | £49.00 |
| Solstice | — | 1kg | £0.92 | £51.00 |
Bags themselves run £6.25 to £99.95. 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
Black Gold No.3 is the cheapest thing Coaltown sells, at 63p a cup. We cannot yet set that against a market average for pods coffee, so treat it as the floor of the range rather than a verdict on value.
What that costs over a year
How much coffee do you drink?
- Coaltown£0.63 per cup£456
- Typical pods£0.52 per cup, our median£378
At 2 cups a day, Coaltown costs £78 more a year than the typical pods coffee we track. Worth knowing before you commit to a subscription.
How Coaltown tastes
We have not tasted Coaltown, 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 Coaltown 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. Coaltown 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.
Coaltown 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 pods coffees we track to Coaltown, and the comparison hubs will put all of them on the same per-cup basis if you want to go wider.
Coffees priced like Coaltown
The closest pods 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
PricesCoaltown price guideEvery bag priced per cup and per kilo, with the cheapest route to each one.BrandAll Coaltown pricesLive prices on all 14 products, cheapest cup first.CompareEvery pods coffeeAll 129 of them on one per-cup basis, filterable by roast and origin.ReviewHalo Coffee 2018 reviewThe closest brand to Coaltown on price, at 63p a cup.OffersToday's best valueEverything currently priced well under the median for its own format.