A Note Before the Gift Guide

The first gift guides of the year have started appearing. We have one in draft and will publish it before the end of November, when the season actually starts rather than when the retail calendar insists it does. Before we do, we want to say three small things about how we think about giving coffee gifts, because the industry publishes a lot of gift guides and most of them are wrong in the same ways.

One. The gift is the beans, not the gear

The thing a coffee lover does not have enough of is good, fresh, interesting coffee from roasters they have not met yet. The thing they almost certainly do have enough of is grinders, kettles, scales, and dripper hardware. If you are tempted to buy somebody a V60 kit, buy them three bags of coffee from three different small roasters instead. The gift is in the discovery. Beans go away. Gear accumulates.

The one exception, and it is a real one, is the person who is clearly on the edge of buying a nicer kettle, scale, or grinder and has been talking about it for months. If you have heard about it, buy it. If you have not, you have not, and the beans are the better gift.

Two. The roast date matters more than the brand

A bag of coffee from a famous roaster that has been sitting on a shelf for six weeks is a worse gift than a bag of coffee from a small local roaster that was roasted on Monday. The former will be flat, oxidised, tired in the cup. The latter will be alive. Buy coffee that was roasted inside the last ten days — fourteen at the outside — and give it inside a week of receiving it. If you have to send it internationally, send it from a roaster who ships quickly and ask them to send it on the day of roasting.

The roast date is almost always on the bag. It is a small print, usually on the bottom seal or the side. If it is not there, do not buy the coffee. A roaster who will not tell you the roast date is a roaster who already knows the answer.

Three. The subscription is a trap

Coffee subscriptions sound like the perfect gift. They are, in our experience, a quietly unkind one. The subscription arrives at a cadence the recipient did not choose, from a roaster the recipient did not choose, in a quantity the recipient did not choose, and the beans sit on the counter past their best because life got busy that week. The person ends up either guilty about the beans or guilty about the sender, and often both.

Give three bags of coffee now, with a note, from three roasters you believe in. If the recipient loves one of them, they will buy the next bag themselves. That is the gift.

The exception, as above, is the person who has been talking about setting up a subscription and has not got around to it. If you have heard about it, do it. If you have not, three bags are the move.

What is coming

Our guide in a few weeks will be short, honest, and specific. A handful of roasters we trust, a few gear items that are genuinely worth it, and a short section on what to put in a stocking that will not end up in a drawer. We will not list anything we have not tried. We will not take a referral fee on anything we have not tried. We will write the guide the way we would write a recommendation to a friend over coffee, which is the only way we know to write one that is any use at all.

In the meantime, if you are starting to think about the season, start with the beans. The season is kinder when it begins there.