Ground coffee · 5 min readCoffee Masters Cafetiere Master Blend review
The most precisely specified grind on this page: 100% arabica from three named origins, cut for a cafetière and a Clever Dripper. It is also the dearest cup here at 44p.
Most pre-ground coffee names a brewing method if you are lucky. Coffee Masters name two, and they are specific enough to be useful: this blend is ground for cafetières and the Clever Coffee Dripper, both immersion brewers that want a coarse, even grind. What goes into it is equally well documented. High-grown arabica from Honduras, Costa Rica and Brazil, no robusta, medium-dark, rated 3 out of 5 on the roaster's own strength scale. At 44p a cup it is the most expensive coffee on this page, and the kilo bag is the one thing about it that does not fit.
A 100% arabica blend from three named origins, cut specifically for immersion brewing, at 44p a cup: the dearest and most precisely specified coffee here.
- Tastes
- Dark chocolate, nutty, a lemony lift
- Strength
- Medium
- Best for
- Cafetière and immersion drippers
- Valuecup price vs the format median
- 3/5
- Easy to likefrom the roast profile
- 4/5
- Good for beginnersblend, roast and pack size
- 4/5
Buy it ifYou brew in a cafetière or a Clever Dripper and want a grind cut for exactly that.
Skip it ifYou use an espresso machine or a moka pot, where this grind cannot work.
Live prices, sizes and retailers for this coffee sit on its product page. This review is the analysis alongside it. See prices →
The most specific grind on this page
Coffee Masters state that this blend is specifically ground for use in cafetières and the Clever Coffee Dripper. Naming the Clever Dripper is the detail that tells you they mean it: it is a steeping dripper with a valve that holds the water in contact with the grounds before releasing it, so it wants the same coarse, even grind a plunger does. Cutting a coffee for both is a coherent decision rather than a marketing line.
Coarse grinds exist because immersion brewing is slow. Four minutes of unpressurised contact will strip a fine grind past the point of pleasure into astringency, so you use bigger particles and let the extended time do the work. Get that pairing right and a cafetière produces one of the fullest, sweetest cups available from cheap equipment. Get it wrong and you produce the bitter, silty coffee that gave the cafetière its reputation.
| Specification | What Coffee Masters publish |
|---|---|
| Bean mix | 100% arabica, high grown |
| Origins | Honduras, Costa Rica and Brazil |
| Roast | Medium-dark (3 of 5) |
| Strength on the label | 3 out of 5 |
| Published notes | Dark chocolate sweetness, nutty, sweet lemony overtones |
| Grind cut for | Cafetière and Clever Coffee Dripper |
| Pack | 1kg, about 55 cups |
| Cost | £0.44 per 18g cup |
Retail listings for this blend state Rainforest Alliance accreditation. Coffee Masters' own product page for the cafetière grind does not repeat that claim, so it is recorded here as a retailer statement rather than as a certification we can confirm.
Three origins, and what each contributes
This is a rare case where a roaster explains the blend rather than just listing the countries. Coffee Masters credit the Costa Rican component with sweetness and the subtle lemony overtones, and the Honduran with toffee sweetness and a good level of acidity. Brazil is the third leg, and Brazilian arabica in a blend is almost always doing what it does best: body, nuttiness and low acidity underneath the more expressive coffees.
The result they describe is dark chocolate sweetness with nutty notes and a subtle acidity. Being 100% arabica matters more in an immersion brewer than it does in espresso: without pressure there is no crema for robusta to build, so robusta's main contribution to a cafetière is the harshness rather than the benefit.
The kilo bag is the wrong pack for this coffee
This is the one real criticism, and it is a genuine one. Every other multi-hundred-gram pack on this page splits into smaller sealed units: four 250g packs, six 200g bags, two 500g packs. This is a kilo in one bag, and ground coffee begins losing aroma the moment air reaches it.
At two cups a day a kilo is around 28 days of coffee. The general advice across this category, including from Costa and Taylors, is to use ground coffee within about two weeks of opening. So roughly the back half of this bag is being drunk outside the window its own competitors recommend, which is a strange thing to accept at the highest cup price on the page.
| Coffee | Pack format | Days per sealed unit at 2 cups a day |
|---|---|---|
| Coffee Masters Master Blend | 1kg, one bag | About 28 |
| by Amazon Espresso Crema | 1kg, four 250g packs | About 7 |
| Taylors Hot Lava Java | 1.2kg, six 200g bags | About 6 |
| Der-Franz Decaffeinated | 1kg, two 500g packs | About 14 |
The fix is cheap and it is on you rather than the roaster: decant into two airtight tins on the day it arrives, and only open the second when the first is empty. It costs nothing and it recovers most of the difference.
44p a cup, and what you get for it
At 44p this is the dearest cup on this page and it sits above the roughly 40p a cup our ground catalogue clusters around. Two cups a day comes to about £321 a year. Against Costa's cafetière grind at 38p, the gap is roughly £44 a year, and what it buys is 100% arabica instead of an arabica and robusta blend, three named origins instead of none, and a roaster's explanation of what each contributes.
That is a defensible premium if origin information is what you want. It is not a defensible premium if you were buying on price, because a cafetière grind is available on this same site for 6p a cup less and the cheapest usable ground coffee here is half the money.
What buyers consistently report
- Smooth, interesting and correctly pitched on strength are the recurring positives, consistent with a 3 of 5 medium-dark.
- The grind draws no complaints about being wrong for a cafetière, which is the point of buying it.
- Freshness across Coffee Masters lines is inconsistent in buyer reports, with some arriving in excellent condition and others flat.
- Feedback volume for this specific pack is thin, so treat the picture as indicative rather than settled.
That last caveat is worth stating plainly. This is a smaller roaster than the supermarket names on this page, and the evidence base behind any judgement about it is correspondingly narrower.
Who should skip it
Espresso and moka pot owners, absolutely. A coarse immersion grind under pressure gushes and tastes sour, and there is no adjustment that fixes it. Skip it if you are buying on price, because there are two cheaper cafetière options on this site and one of them is 21p a cup less. And skip the kilo specifically if you drink coffee occasionally, because you will be finishing a stale bag in week six and blaming the roaster.
If you brew immersion every day, want your arabica named and traced to three countries, and will decant it properly, this is a well-made and well-explained coffee. It is just priced at the top of what this format asks.
Keep reading