What's the best upgrade you could ever get for your coffee machine? Whether you prefer filter, pour over or espresso, the answer is obvious: better coffee beans. Or, perhaps, Beanz. Beanz.com is a new subscription coffee service, and it's nothing to do with Heinz and its tinned larder staple. It's coffee beans, brought to you by the coffee nuts at Sage. There have been coffee subscription services before, but this one draws upon the expertise – and beans – of some of the world's best small-batch coffee roasters. It's giving you access to the type of beans you'll find at the very best, most distressed-wood-filled, man-bunned, artisan coffee shops in the UK and America. This is coffee by coffee lovers, for anyone who wants better coffee.
Sage makes some of the best coffee machines you can buy, from the 1,000,000-selling Barista range to the extremely premium Oracle Touch. However, you could spend £1 million – Sage doesn't make any machines that cost £1 million, just to be clear – and buy the most idiot-proof coffee maker in the world and still get rubbish coffee out of it if the beans you're using are no good. Hence, Beanz.com by Sage.
I went to the launch, and boy did I learn a lot about coffee beans. I would say I needed a coffee after that, but I actually had several during. I came away buzzing, and cycled back to the office ever so fast.
First things first: no you don't need to own a Sage coffee machine to sign up for Beanz.com. Sage – known as Breville in the rest of the world, for reasons too confusing to go into here – has magnanimously allowed anyone to buy their prime-quality beans.
While real coffee experts may already know what they prefer like the back of their vintage Japanese denim selvedge jeans, a lot of Beanz.com customers will be like me. In other words, they'll have only the vaguest idea of what they want, but be willing to experiment. So while the option of shopping the entire range is always available, for the less knowledgable and/or decisive, there is Barista's Choice.
With Barista's Choice, the Beanz.com website acts rather like a coffee sommelier, cutting down the huge range on offer to the beans you are most likely to enjoy. It does this simply by enquiring as to whether sir/madam prefers coffee with notes that are fruity, chocolatey or caramel-ish and whether you use an espresso or drip/filter coffee machine.
You can choose to receive from two to five bags, every one to four weeks, with the option of whole beans, to grind yourself, or pre-ground beans done specifically for your choice of a drip machine – Chemex, Aeropress, French press or pour over coffee maker. So in summary: there is a lot of choice. Oh and you can opt for decaff as well, if you like.
Upgrade to smarter living
Get the latest news, reviews, deals and buying guides on gorgeous tech, home and active products straight to your inbox.
What you get each time you receive your subscription will vary, although you can also opt to stick to a bean that you turn out to particularly love. You can also take a questionnaire that asks the same questions as the one for Barista's Choice but adds the most important query for a lot of coffee drinkers: black or white? It then picks what it thinks is the ideal bean for you from the current range.
The idea is that between you and the Beanz.com algorithm, you'll open up your understanding of coffee and never need to go to a coffee shop ever again to get the very finest beverage, tailored to you. Sage/Breville also offers a huge range of online video tutorials to get the best out of each of its large range of different machines. before you know it, you'll be living in a world of tasting notes and exotic blends from all around the world, learning the characteristics of each.
So is Beanz.com coffee any good? Hell yeah. I am not a trained coffee taster so I unfortunately have to drink entire cups of it rather than rinsing a teaspoonful around my mouth, ejecting it into a spittoon and announcing, 'notes of blueberry cheesecake'. So it's going to take me a long time to work my way through what Beanz.com has to offer, probably becoming increasingly agitated and hyper along the way. What I've had so far has all been superb, however.
The website provides helpful tasting notes for every bean as well as info on where it's from. Of course, describing the flavour of coffee can be highly subjective, but Beanz.com makes a pretty good fist of letting you know what it's likely to taste of, and how well it'll work with milk.
Beanz.com: pricing
As far as I can see, individual, 250g bags of coffee cost from £8 to £11.50 at Beanz.com. I say 'as far as I can see' because the list of what's available seems to scroll on to infinity. However, if you opt for Barista's Choice, whatever you get sent costs a flat £8 per bag, keeping things simple.
If you get at least two bags per delivery – two is the minimum available via Barista's Choice – shipping is free. At the moment you can get 25% off all subscriptions for the first 3 months with the code BETTERBREW at checkout.
In the USA, where Beanz.com launched late last year, pricing is from $16 to $21.50 and it's $16 per bag for Barista's Choice. I dare say at some point the service will come to Breville's native Australia and elsewhere but for the time being, it's America and the UK only.
Is £8 per 250g bag expensive? Compared to supermarket coffee beans, yes. Compared to drinking in the kind of upmarket coffee shops where you'd normally find beans of this freshness, quality and diversity, no. If you've splashed out on a coffee machine from Sage or any other brand, Beanz.com could be the missing part of the puzzle that means you get the quality coffee you wanted when you researched and bought your machine.
Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.
Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years.
A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."
-
Denon's 5-star earbuds suddenly drop to lowest-ever price in time-limited deal
The Denon PerL Pro drop to lowest price yet, with over $100 off
By Mike Lowe Published
-
Netflix's new no.1 is sci-fi horror sequel set 5 years after acclaimed original
The Platform 2 is on another level – albeit a lower one, as it's not been as critically received as the 2019 original
By Mike Lowe Published
-
I visited LG’s HQ in Korea – and these are the 5 LG appliances I want for my house
LG’s latest home appliances are smart, efficient and make your life easier
By Bethan Girdler-Maslen Published
-
KitchenAid KF8 bean-to-cup espresso maker review: a top performing automatic coffee machine for well-heeled loafers
If you can afford the high price, the new KitchenAid KF8 takes automated coffee making to a whole new level of sophistication
By Derek Adams Published
-
Smart kettles are taking over the kitchen – here’s why you need one
3 reasons why you need a smart kettle for your kitchen
By Bethan Girdler-Maslen Published
-
KitchenAid’s iconic stand mixer gets a stunning nature-inspired upgrade
KitchenAid launches its Evergreen Design Series Stand Mixer – but will people buy it?
By Bethan Girdler-Maslen Published
-
COSORI takes on Meater with its own meat thermometer – and it's seriously impressive
COSORI’s Smart Meat Thermometer offers wireless and customisable cooking
By Bethan Girdler-Maslen Last updated
-
Dualit Espressivo Pro review: a top semi-auto espresso maker for discerning coffee aficionados
The Dualit Espressivo Pro produces espressos every bit as good as the ‘pro’ moniker suggests
By Derek Adams Published
-
Beko takes on Samsung with its new range of AI-assisted appliances
Beko adds AI enhancements to its appliances, including food recognition technology
By Bethan Girdler-Maslen Published
-
Philips Series 5500 LatteGo EP5546/70 Coffee Machine review: a dream machine for custom coffees
Philips' impressive LatteGo system delivers superb coffees – more than 20 different kinds
By Carrie Marshall Published