How Much Coffee You Need a Month, and How Often to Have It Delivered

The most useful number to know before setting up a coffee subscription is not a price. It is how many grams of coffee your household gets through in a month. Get it right and every bag is used while it is fresh. Get it wrong and you end up with bags stacking up or a week without coffee, which are the two reasons people cancel subscriptions they otherwise like.

Start with grams per cup

The Specialty Coffee Association's golden cup standard is 55 g of coffee to a litre of water. It is a reference point rather than a rule, but it is the one most brewing advice is built on, so we use it here. For a 240 ml mug of filter coffee that is about 13 g.

Espresso is different. A double shot usually takes 16 to 20 g of coffee for a drink a fraction of the size, so if your household drinks lattes rather than mugs of filter, work from 18 g a drink instead.

How many cups a bag makes

At 13 g a mug, the bag sizes the subscriptions we track send work out like this:

• 227 g, Volcanica's bag: about 17 mugs
• 250 g, Origin's bag: about 19 mugs
• 310 g, Trade's bag: about 23 mugs
• 340 g, the most common size: about 26 mugs
• 454 g, Peet's one pound bag: about 34 mugs

For espresso at 18 g a double, a 340 g bag gives about 19 drinks. That gap between filter and espresso drinkers is larger than most people expect.

From cups a day to grams a month

Multiply your daily cups by the grams per cup and by 30. One person drinking two mugs of filter a day uses about 800 g a month. A couple each drinking two uses about 1.6 kg. A household making four double espressos a day uses about 2.2 kg.

Write that monthly figure down. It is the number every other decision on this page is built on.

Turning grams into a cadence

Divide the bag size by your daily use to see how many days one bag lasts. Two mugs a day from a 340 g bag lasts about 13 days, so the matching cadence is every two weeks. The same drinker on Peet's one pound bags lasts about 17 days, which is closer to every three weeks than two.

Then check the service offers that interval. Most do, but the choice varies a lot. The Stumptown Coffee Club is the most flexible we list, every 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 8 weeks. Atlas offers only two or four weeks, Black Rifle 14, 21, 30 or 60 days, and the Volcanica Coffee Club ships monthly. Our guide to how coffee subscriptions work goes through cadence and skipping together.

Why smaller and more often wins

Whole beans are at their best for the first two to four weeks after roasting. A bag that lasts you a fortnight is drunk entirely inside that window. A bag that lasts six weeks is not, however well you store it, and our page on how to store coffee beans explains what air, light and heat do to it in the meantime.

So when the arithmetic lands between two options, choose the shorter interval or the smaller bag. The Peet's subscription is the cheapest per kilo we track, at $43.98, but its one pound bag suits a household that gets through it in three weeks, not one person who takes six.

When your usage changes

Nobody drinks the same amount every month. Holidays, guests and a new brewer all move the figure. This is what the skip and reschedule buttons are for, and every service we list lets you cancel from your own account without a commitment beyond one delivery.

If you find yourself skipping every third delivery, lengthen the interval instead. If you run out a few days before each bag arrives, shorten it by a week. Two or three months of that and the cadence settles, which is when a subscription starts doing its job without you noticing it.