This coffee subscription box helped me figure out what kinds of coffee I actually enjoy drinking
- While 65% of Americans say they drink coffee regularly, it seems fair to say a far smaller percentage knows much about the drink, including which flavor profiles they personally enjoy.
- Brooklyn-based startup Driftaway Coffee has a "Tasting Kit" with four major flavor profiles for customers to taste and rate to help them develop their coffee palates.
- Driftaway uses the results to create a flavor profile for you and will cater their next shipment to fit your taste buds, so you can enjoy trying new coffees you'll more than likely like.
- See more: The best instant coffee
While millions of us can agree that coffee is some sort of delicious, ordinary miracle, it can be difficult figuring out which flavors you actually enjoy. This is compounded when you realize that there are few opportunities to get insight from experts who know enough about it to actually advise you in the process.
So while 65% of Americans say they drink coffee regularly, there's still a separation between aficionados who have the ability to identify their preferred flavor profile and those who, like me, need a healthy pour of 2% milk and a tablespoon of sugar to transform it into something more drinkable.
That's where Brooklyn-based startup Driftaway Coffee wants to help. The company has a subscription service meant to help you identify your flavor profile and then customizes what it sends you based on your results, so you can enjoy your morning brew and learn about what you like.
How Driftaway Coffee works
Once you sign up for the subscription service, they'll have you start out with the Tasting Kit. Your first Tasting Kit will be made up of four 2-ounce bags of single-origin, whole coffee beans from four flavor profiles: a bold roast, a classic roast, a balanced roast, and a fruity roast.
From there, simply taste your way through the kit to find which roast and flavor profile is your favorite. Future shipments will then be informed by your results so you'll be getting coffee that's catered specifically to you each time.
However, you still get the final word on what you receive; Driftaway will send an email with the contents of your upcoming box every Wednesday before they ship it out on Friday, so you can preview and alter the selections should you so choose.
You can also customize the amount of coffee (7-ounce, 11-ounce, 16-ounce, or 32-ounce) and frequency of shipments (weekly, every 2 weeks, or monthly), as well as billing frequency (per shipment or every 6 months). Because of the ability to customize, the subscription price fluctuates from $12 to $22 per shipment. If you choose to pay every 6 months, those prices can drop to $14.71 and $18.86, respectively, saving you up to $84 over the pay period.
The type of coffee you get with Driftaway
The coffees are all gourmet, single-origin selections that hail from coffee standard-bearers, such as Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, and span multiple continents. They roast each week on Friday and ship beans within 12 hours, unless a different shipping date is specified. To prevent degradation of flavor and to give you the best homebrew possible, they only sell whole-bean coffee.
While the tasting kits change from time to time, as their coffees do, you can always expect to get roasts from each of the four main flavor profiles — Fruity, Classic, Balanced, and Bold.
If you're looking for decaf, though, you're out of luck. And if you already know what you like and would rather skip the experience of a tasting kit, you can order individual bags of fresh beans.
The bottom line
If a coffee service that does all the legwork of getting great coffee that you'll like sounds good, you might want to give Driftaway Coffee a chance. At the very least, you're getting delicious beans but once you get past that, you're also getting that extra bit of knowledge and insight so you can learn more about what you're drinking.