10 Exceptional Coffees Under $20: Coffee Review

Great coffee at a fair price is about more than just doing the math.

What makes a coffee a good value?

The obvious answer is quality relative to price, and that was our starting point for this report. We looked for coffees that cost no more than $19 per 12 ounces that still offer everything we love about specialty coffee: complexity, character, and, above all, the pleasure of a really good cup.

The 10 coffees reviewed here make a persuasive case: All score 93 or 94 points, an unusually narrow range of consistently high quality. (And a handful more coffees scored 90 or above — see below for the shortlist of runners-up.)

But the idea of “value” is more complicated.

For the average consumer, value generally means getting more than expected for the money. For a coffee producer, the calculation looks quite different. A coffee can be remarkably inexpensive at retail and still not represent especially good value if the low price is made possible by pushing economic pressure back toward the farm. (In a nutshell, that is why we didn’t cup supermarket coffees for this report; for example, a coffee that costs $12 a bag unequivocally shortchanges the farmer.)

So, while this report focuses on coffees that offer high quality at accessible prices, it also raises a larger question: What does value mean in the specialty coffee ecosystem, in which everyone — not just the consumer but the producer and roaster, too — needs to benefit?

10 Value Coffees to Get Excited About

The most striking feature of this month’s results is their consistency of quality and complexity. Four coffees lead the pack at 94 points:

Haiku Brew’s Popyan Colombia
Intrinsic Coffee’s Kenya Kaganda
Intuition Coffee’s Ethiopia Muda Tatesa Natural
Jackrabbit Java’s Costa Rica

Six more scored 93:

Duluth Coffee Company’s Ethiopia Tigest Wako Natural
Durango Coffee Company’s Guatemala Guaya’B Natural
Elevator Coffee’s El Indio Costa Rica
Magnolia Coffee’s Victory Blend
Speedwell Coffee Roasters’ Ethiopia Yirgacheffe
Topeca Coffee’s El Salvador Manzano

All are available for $19 or less per 12 ounces.

That price point might not sound inexpensive to coffee drinkers accustomed to supermarket pricing, but it represents a notably accessible tier in contemporary specialty coffee, where $30 bags are increasingly commonplace and rare varieties and microlots can cost considerably more.

And these are not merely solid everyday coffees. Scores of 93 and 94 put all 10 comfortably in the territory of distinctive specialty coffee. These 10 coffees suggest that there remains a compelling middle ground between commodity-oriented coffee and the increasingly rarefied upper reaches of the specialty market.

What Does a Dollar Buy?

Coffee is an unusual luxury because even very good versions remain relatively inexpensive on a per-serving basis.

Consider the everyday economics of a good cup of coffee. Using a 1:16 coffee-to-water ratio (which we generally tend to prefer over the SCA’s 1:18 “golden ratio”), a six-ounce serving requires about 11 grams of ground coffee. That means a 12-ounce bag (~340 grams) yields roughly 31 cups. Even at $19 a bag, the most expensive coffee in this report costs just 62 cents per cup brewed at home. That’s a remarkable amount of pleasure for considerably less than a dollar.

In other words, three dollars at the bag level — a meaningful 19 percent difference in retail price — translates into roughly 16 cents per cup.

This is not to suggest that price does not matter. It does, particularly for people who drink many cups a day or buy coffee for a household. But the per-cup calculation puts the relative affordability of specialty coffee into perspective. A carefully sourced coffee, skillfully roasted, can still cost about a dollar to prepare at home.

The more difficult question is how much of that dollar makes its way back through the supply chain.

Value at Origin

Many of the qualities we reward in specialty coffee are expensive to produce. Ripe-cherry selection requires labor. Careful processing requires labor, equipment, water or other infrastructure, depending on the method. Sorting lowers the amount of coffee a producer can ultimately sell. Maintaining healthy trees and soil requires investment, as does adapting farms to increasingly unpredictable growing conditions.

In other words, quality has a cost before a green coffee buyer or roaster ever encounters the coffee.

This creates an inherent tension in any discussion of value. We want coffee to be affordable, but we also want producers to grow better coffee, pay farmers fairly, improve processing, protect their farms and remain viable for another generation. Those goals become difficult to reconcile if value is understood simply as paying less.

Nor can we assume that a higher retail price means that a producer was better compensated. The route from farmgate price to retail price is too complicated for that. Transportation, lot size, importing, storage, roast loss, packaging, and labor all affect the final price, as do the business models and margins of individual roasters and the wide-ranging demands of their locations.

What we can say is that a low price, alone, tells us very little about whether a coffee represents value throughout the supply chain.

The Everyday Sweet Spot

At Coffee Review, we spend considerable time tasting coffees at the other end of the price spectrum: rare Geishas, coddled microlots, competition coffees and lots subjected to increasingly elaborate processing methods. Some are extraordinary, and some justify their prices through rarity, sensory distinction, exceptional production costs, or some combination of all three.

They also occupy a different place in most coffee drinkers’ lives. The 10 coffees reviewed here are interesting because they do not ask to be treated as special-occasion coffees. At $19 or less per 12 ounces, they are plausible everyday purchases for most specialty-coffee drinkers, yet their scores put them within striking distance of coffees that cost considerably more. (And if you’re not a fan of the experimental processing trend, all the better for you, as these value coffees are largely processed simply and traditionally, whether washed or natural.)

There is pleasure in discovering an extraordinary rare coffee, but there is a different kind of pleasure in finding a very good coffee that can simply become a daily drinker. And perhaps this is where the most useful definition of value lies. A good value in specialty coffee is not necessarily the cheapest coffee we can find. It is a coffee that delivers overt quality and inherent pleasure for its price while participating, as much as we can determine, in a supply chain capable of sustaining the people who produce it.

The 10 coffees reviewed this month succeed emphatically on the first measure: They all score 93 or 94 points and cost no more than about a dollar per home-brewed cup. (Read the linked reviews for details about the roasters, origins, processing methods and sensory profiles.)

The second measure is harder to quantify, but no less important. If specialty coffee asks consumers to care about where coffee comes from, who grows it, and why one coffee tastes different from another, then those things necessarily belong in our understanding of value as well. (Transparency in pricing is another can o’ worms, but you get the drift.)

Honorable Mentions

These coffees, all priced at $19 or less per 12 ounces, scored 90 points or higher in our cupping for this report:

Alpen Sierra Coffee Roasting Co.’s Organic Big Blue Tahoe
Blind Dog Coffee’s Tanner’s House Blend
Craft Coffee’s Shoulders of Giants
Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company’s Ethiopian Boa Bedegelo
Eiland Coffee Roasters’ Ethiopia Sidamo Ardi Natural
Fieldheads Coffee Company’s 406 Fair Trade Organic Coffee
Kakalove Café’s Myanmar Washed Ywangan Green Land Catuai G1
Muggswigz Coffee & Tea Co.’s Brazil Cerrado
To the Moooon’s Noxcat to the Moooon
Twiga Coffee’s Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Organic Medium

Specialty coffee is one of life’s most accessible luxuries, but its affordability shouldn’t depend on someone else absorbing the true cost of producing it. It’s one that makes growing coffee worth the labor, roasting it worth the care, and drinking it one of the pleasures worth looking forward to every day.