Angels Cup Coffee subscription Review

Have you ever had a coffee with someone who can pull out the most bizarrely specific tasting notes? “I’m getting notes of dried mango, Kyoho grapes, and rose petals…”.

The ability to clearly define flavors isn’t a gift that some are simply born with. It sounds strange, but tasting coffee is all about practice. 

That is the idea behind the Angels Cup coffee subscription. Not only do they offer ample coffees for you to taste completely blind, but they also offer a fun and unique way of learning how to taste with other subscribers and roasters. 

Let’s get stuck in with our Angels Cup review, where we look at this unique, blind taste test subscription! 

Who Are Angels Cup?

Based out of Brooklyn, New York, Angels Cup are a coffee subscription service with a very specific goal. 

To give you, and I quote, “a superhuman sense of taste”. In other words, the company wants you to learn how to taste coffee like a pro. How? By using a tasting model of trying lots of different beans blindly, without any knowledge of the coffees and their origins.

Keep reading for an in-depth look at the service via our Angels Cup review! 

Angels Cup Coffee Subscription Review 2024

Angels Cup isn’t your standard, receive a bag, brew a cup kind of coffee subscription. What they offer is more of a tool to help you on the road to attaining superhuman sensory skills. Kind of like spiderman, but rather than your spidey sense, it’ll be your coffee sense that’s tingling and then some. 

Instead of sending out bags of coffee beans like most subscription services, Angels Cup focuses their efforts on offering blind tasting kits, also known as tasting flights. 

These tasting flights include 4 small bags of coffee. Each bag is designed to brew between 2 and 4 cups of coffee. With 4 new samples to taste each week, we have ourselves one pretty kick-ass sensory tool! 

If you take these coffee beans, grind them up, throw them in bowls, and pour some hot water on them, you have yourself a cupping session. This, my friends, is exactly how specialty coffee professionals attain their insane sense of taste. 

Working with over 200 artisan coffee roasters across the US, there is no shortage of amazing coffee to try. There are so many, in fact, that you won’t taste the same coffee in any one calendar year. Aww yeah! Something for every coffee lover.

And if you don’t like the coffee that Angels Cup sends you, they’ll give you your money back, no questions asked.

Yup…Even if you’ve tried more than just some of the coffee.    

As part of the tasting experience, Angles Cup offers a free app that you can use to review each coffee. You don’t even need to be a subscriber to use it, so if you want to check it out before you sign up, go for it.

Enter the details about what you’re tasting—the acidity, body, and flavor notes of the coffee, along with your brew method. With a user base of over 30,000 tasters, you can compare your notes to other Angels Cup subscribers, as well as the notes written by the roasters themselves. Here’s an example screenshot of the app:

In comparing your notes with those of fellow subscribers and roasters, you’ll be able to start recognizing new flavors. You’ll learn how to articulate what you are tasting. It’s a whole tasting process— like learning any new skill.

Why Choose Angels Cup?

It’s a subscription to learn about coffee. 

When you buy a batch of coffee and brew it every day, you get to know that coffee very well. You’ll know it has some deep berry notes, a delicious, crisp, apple-like acidity, and a long finish. But there isn’t a whole lot to learn. 

It’s not until you review brews side-by-side that the learning begins. 

You start to notice the differences and the similarities between the brews. Tasting an explosive, berry forward Kenyan, next to a chocolatey Guatemalan, opens the window to how different the two brews really are. 

This kind of comparative tasting is the key to unlocking the true power of your tastebuds!

Coffee Assortment

Angles Cup works with hundreds of roasters across the United States to ship out 208 unique coffees each year. 

They don’t roast coffee, but rather act as a curator, selecting the best coffees to send on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis.

Angels Cup taste every coffee that they ship out to you. They sample beans from big world-renowned roasters, all the way through to tiny micro-roasters, hunting for brews to include in their coffee subscription boxes.

But, there is a drawback – this is possibly one of the least customizable coffee subscriptions around. 

The only choice you’re given with Angels Cup is the roast levels you prefer. Either light, medium, or dark. While having little to no customization might be a bad thing for some, it will certainly pull you out of any kind of coffee rut you find yourself in. Leave it to them to find the good stuff!

So what can we expect in terms of coffee? 

If you choose a light roast subscription, all the beans will be single origin, focusing on the characteristics of the bean itself. There should be no perceivable roasty flavors to the coffee, and it will most likely be fruit-driven with bright acidity.

Medium roasts have their focus shift to sweetness over clarity and acidity. Rather than tasting fresh peaches, we might taste stewed fruits, chocolates, and caramels.

Dark roasts put more of a focus on the roast profiles themselves rather than the inherent traits of the green coffee beans. Rich with notes of raw cocoa and often smokey, dark roasted beans display little to no acidity.     

After selecting your roast preference, you can select if you want your coffee to come as whole beans or ground. Grind size can be selected— either coarse grind or fine.

From there, choose your frequency and one of three subscription options. A Cupping Flight, The Black Box, or a bag of top-rated coffee, aka the All Stars. We’ll look at these in more detail in a moment. For now, we’re all about the coffee. 

Picking either a Flight or The Black Box, each delivery will contain 4 coffees packaged in nondescript bags. These will be specialty brews from a roast master based in the United States.

Here’s how it works: The roasting company sends Angles Cup big 5 pound bags of roasted coffee. Angels Cup repackages the coffee into smaller tasting bags, then sends them, along with the cupping notes written by the roast master, to their customers. 

Unfortunately, the bags that Angels Cup use are the non-resealable kind. Once opened, air can get in there and wreak havoc on the beans. If you don’t finish the bag in one go using your chosen brew method, you’ll probably want to put each in an airtight container to keep it fresh. 

The content of the bags is a secret. Angles Cup has gone to great lengths to make sure of that. No information on the origin of the beans, roaster, or tasting notes is printed on the packaging. All that is printed on the coffee samples is the roast date and the sample number.

You won’t know for certain what pleasures await until you either:

a) look at the information cards, or; 

b) log your final score of the coffee using the app.  

A note on not ruining surprises for yourself: When you receive a Tasting Flight or The Black Box, details of the coffee will be written on the backs of 4 information cards. There is space on each card to write your brew method, as well as a few flavor descriptors.

Be careful when opening the Angels Cup packaging that you don’t accidentally peep the info side of the cards. That’ll spoil the blind tasting and is kind of against the point of the whole thing!

Up to 208 Unique Coffees every year!

When signing up for one of the blind tasting boxes, you have a chance to taste 208 brews throughout the year. The exact number of different brews you’ll receive depends on if you are a light, medium, or dark roasted coffee drinker.

Light roast subscription members will receive 4 new coffees per delivery. So if you signed up for weekly deliveries, that’s 4 new brews per week— 208 over the year. 

Medium roast orders receive 4 new coffees every fortnight. Meaning that if you are receiving weekly shipments, you’ll get the same brew two weeks in a row. 

For dark roasts, we’re looking at 4 new coffees every month. Weekly orders will see the same coffees weekly for four weeks. 

This seems a little bit harsh, only offering real variety to those who enjoy light roasts. If I were a dark coffee lover, I’d certainly want more than 4 different brews every month. Especially from a tasting club like Angels Cup. 

Maybe this is the Angels Cup way of getting people to drink lighter roasted coffee!

If, after cupping your coffee, there is one that you particularly love, you can head over to Angles Cup for a hookup. They will sort you out with a link to the roaster, allowing you to buy the coffee directly from them. Angels Cup doesn’t take some kind of a cut for the referral either. This is a nice way of supporting the roasters they work with. 

Ordering & Delivery Experience

When compared to a subscription like Trade Coffee, in which you need to take a quiz to get started, Angels Cup is incredibly simple. 

First, you choose your roast level— either light, medium, or dark. 

Then, select how you want the coffee to arrive— ground (you can pick your grind size), or as whole bean coffee. Remember, coffee will always taste best when it’s ground fresh, immediately before brewing.

Next, we’ll pick our delivery frequency— every week, every fortnight, every 3 weeks, or every month. When choosing your frequency, keep in mind that the coffee only changes monthly when it comes to dark roasts and fortnightly when it comes to medium roasts.

From here, we pick our subscription option— The Cupping Flight, The Black Box, or the All Stars. The Flight and The Black Box are basically the same thing, but a Black Box includes larger 2.75 oz samples of coffee. Both options are designed to be a blind taste test via cupping or brewing single cups. 

Blind coffee tasting boxes are an excellent way of gaining more exposure to different coffees easily. Without a subscription like Angels Cup, you’d need to go to a roaster and buy 4 different brews. But how will you buy these 4 choices AND keep them a secret from yourself?!  

Rather than buying 4 full bags of coffee to taste, Angels Cup organizes everything for you, ready to cup. It’s a lot easier and more fun this way. 

For those who aren’t into cupping, but still love a surprise, check out the Angels Cup All Stars subscription. 

All Stars orders are full 12 oz bags of whole bean coffee. No preground option here, I’m afraid. You can still choose your roast preference and delivery frequency, though. This is good for people who like to really like to dial in their cup of coffee.

I love the way that Angels Cup picks the coffee that ends up in the All Stars subscription. When subscription members log their favorites into the Angels Cup App, the top rated coffees are dubbed the ‘All Stars’. These are the beans that are shipped as whole, 12 oz bags. 

The usual shipment day is on Wednesdays, with most coffees arriving at your door within 10 days post-roast. Because each company will roast beans on a different day, you may receive your package a little fresher than that, or it might take a bit longer. 

Here is a breakdown of each Angels Cup coffee experience and what you get in each. Black and white, nice and simple.

  Angels Cup – The Cupping Flight

Price: 

• Pay per delivery $9.99/box. 
• Pay for 6 shipments $9.49/box.
• Pay for 12 shipments $8.99/box.  

Shipping:

• $3 US, $10 Canada.

What do you get?

• Four 1 oz samples of coffee.

How many cups in total can I make?

• About 8.

Can I taste these brews blind? 

• Yes.

Shipment day:

• Wednesday.

When will I get my coffee?! 

• Usually 7-10 days off-roast.

Angels Cup – The Black Box

Price: 

• Pay per delivery $19.99/box. 
• Pay for 6 shipments $18.99/box.
• Pay for 12 shipments $17.99/box.  

Shipping:

• $5 US, $15 Canada.

What do you get?

• Four 2.75 oz samples of coffee.

How many cups in total can I make?

• About 20.

Can I taste these brews blind? 

• Yes.

Shipment day:

• Wednesday.

When will I get my coffee?! 

• Usually 7-10 days off-roast.

Angels Cup – All Stars

Price: 

• Pay per delivery $17.49/box. 
• Pay for 6 shipments $16.62/box.
• Pay for 12 shipments $15.74/box.  

Shipping:

• $5 US, $15 Canada.

What do you get?

• One 12 oz bag of coffee. 

How many cups in total can I make?

• About 24.

Can I taste this coffee blind? 

• No.

Shipment day:

• Wednesday.

When will I get my coffee?! 

• Usually 3-5 days off-roast.

Gifts!

Angels Cup also offers gift subscriptions, perfect for the coffee aficionado in your life (we’ve all got one). All you’ll need to know is their roast preference— either light, medium, or dark roasted coffee, and whether or not they grind their own coffee. 

Lacking this knowledge, you could pretty safely choose medium roasts and top up the gift with a Hario Skerton or something like that. Even if they have a grinder at home, a manual option is still excellent for travel, making it a solid gift. 

Send them through either one, six, or twelve shipments— guaranteed to make you their favorite person of life (though you probably already are).

Pricing

Deciding whether or not an Angels Cup coffee subscription is good value is totally down to your expectations. Do you want a bag of coffee or an experience?

If you consider Angels Cup as a tool— a way of sharpening your palette and gaining exposure to hundreds of different brews each year, then it’s tremendous value.

Here we have a fully curated, blind cupping experience, fully organized for $13, including shipping. Having someone take care of choosing the samples, packaging and logistics make things so much easier. I think it’s worth it. 

But if you look at it as simply 4 small bags of coffee for $13, it’s pretty expensive. I mean, that works out at about 4 cents more per gram than it would be if you bought a whole bag. Not an amazing deal. 

It wouldn’t be fair to look at it like that, though, because that’s not really what it’s designed to be. It’s not just a cup of coffee— it’s an experience. You are paying for the variety and the logistics, rather than just the coffee itself.  

The biggest downside to the pricing of Angels Cup is that they charge for shipping. Delivery will tack on an extra $3 for Cupping Flights and an extra $5 for both The Black Box and All Stars subscriptions. 

Taking into account the delivery fee, when it comes to buying whole bags of coffee, I’d probably give Angels Cup a miss. There are loads of other coffee subscriptions out there that offer free shipping. They are sending out equally high-quality coffee, for a lower price. 

Angels Cup Isn’t For You If…

You want to choose your own cupping flights.

If there are particular beans you want to try for a cupping experience — maybe coffee beans from East Africa or various forms of the bourbon varietal, Angles Cup isn’t the subscription for you. 

You’ll be better off choosing your own coffees, labeling the cups, and jumbling them up on the table. The jumbling will mean that you are still cupping semi-blind. At the very least you won’t know which coffee is which. 

Another cool option if you want to try specific brews is to set up your own coffee tasting club. Get a few members together, and each person picks up 4 bags of beans or so. Then everyone splits the bags up into portions and shares them with the other members. You can create your own version of the tasting cards assigning each bag a letter that correlates to a card.

This way, you’ll be able to talk together about the coffees you all want to experience and review them afterward. It’s way more effort, but you’ll get coffee that you know you want to try.

If you want the best deal on full bags of coffee.

Though they do offer full bags of coffee, that’s not really what the Angels Cup experience is all about. With the main drawcard being the blind tasting boxes, the All Stars option feels like more of an added extra. And an expensive one at that. They are more about giving coffee drinkers a tasting experience.

Coffee subscription services like Mistobox and Trade Coffee both offer better deals and more customization. Not only can you pick your roast preference, but also the flavors that you like in your coffee beans. When it comes to full bags, I would probably go with one of those instead. Check out the review of each in the links above to see what we thought about those! 

The Final Verdict

In offering hundreds of different beans each year, Angels Cup can all but guarantee that your coffee palette will become sharper. 

Even without trying— if you simply receive The Cupping Flight and brew the coffees like normal. You will still be exposing yourself to a huge number of brews, even more, than some coffee roasters might get to try.

With the promise of a superhuman sense of taste and a money-back guarantee, what have you got to lose!? 

I hope you’ve enjoyed our Angels Cup review – keep brewing!