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Brand review · 3 min readLyons coffee review
What Lyons sells, what it costs against the rest of the market, and who should buy it.
Lyons sells 1 coffee in the UK and the cheapest comes out at 6p a cup, which is less than most of the instant 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 jar for the mornings when thirty seconds is the budget, and it is cheap.
Cheaper than 98% of the instant coffee we track
- Tastes
- Balanced, caramel and chocolate
- Strength
- Medium
- Best for
- Speed over ceremony
- Valuecup price vs the format median
- 5/5
- Easy to likefrom the roast profile
- 5/5
- Good for beginnersblend, roast and pack size
- 5/5
Cheapest cup£0.06across 1 product
Against the market−43%vs the instant median
Two cups a day£0.85a week, £0.65 less than typical
Mostly roastedMediumcaramel, balanced
Buy it ifyou want a cup in thirty seconds
Skip it ifyou are chasing a named farm or origin
What kind of roaster this is
Lyons sells instant in the UK, and we track 1 of its coffees, in 750g.
100% of the Lyons 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. Everything is roasted to the same point on our five-point scale, so the roast is not a choice you make here; it is the house style, take it or leave it. Nothing here comes in a kilo bag. That keeps the coffee fresher in your cupboard and costs you the bulk discount, which is the trade you are making whether or not anyone points it out.
Formats and origins
What Lyons sources and sells. Each one is a live filter across every brand we track.
What Lyons coffee costs
Everything Lyons sells lands at the same 6p a cup, across one product. That makes the choice about roast and origin rather than money.
| Product | Format | Size | Per cup | Per kg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gold Roast Tin Luxury Freeze Dried | instant | 750g | £0.06 | £30.39 |
The one to buy
If you buy one thing from Lyons, buy Gold Roast Tin Luxury Freeze Dried. At 6p a cup it comes in around 43% under the median for instant coffee, and that is measured against every brand in our catalogue rather than against Lyons'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?
- Lyons£0.06 per cup£44
- Typical instant£0.11 per cup, our median£78
At 2 cups a day, Lyons costs £34 less a year than the typical instant coffee we track. That is the same coffee habit, bought better.
How Lyons tastes
We have not tasted Lyons, 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 Lyons 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.
- Slow drinkers, and anyone who would rather buy little and often than watch a kilo go stale.
- 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. Lyons 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.
Lyons products we track
Cheapest per cup first, with live prices.
Check today’s pricePrices 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 instant coffees we track to Lyons, and the comparison hubs will put all of them on the same per-cup basis if you want to go wider.
Coffees priced like Lyons
The closest instant 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
PricesLyons price guideEvery bag priced per cup and per kilo, with the cheapest route to each one.BrandAll Lyons pricesLive prices on all 1 product, cheapest cup first.CompareEvery instant coffeeAll 45 of them on one per-cup basis, filterable by roast and origin.ReviewNESCAFÉ reviewThe closest brand to Lyons on price, at 6p a cup.OffersToday's best valueEverything currently priced well under the median for its own format.