With so many blends, roasts, and strengths, tracking down the perfect coffee beans online can be a challenge.
However, with a few key insights and some forethought about what you’re looking for, you can find the best coffee online in no time. From the bold flavors of Vietnamese robusta coffee to the delicate profile of arabica beans, we’ll take you through everything you need to know so you can pick the best coffee for your tastes.
What Do the Best Coffees Online Have in Common?
While finding the best type of coffee for you is subjective, several key factors make one coffee great and another trash-worthy.
Here are some of the main characteristics you should look for in coffee:
- Organically Grown: organically grown coffee not only ensures the beans aren’t treated with harmful chemicals, but it also ensures a higher quality crop. Sustainable growing procedures ensure the coffee is grown without invasive action. Inorganic coffee is often produced by pumping the crop with chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce a low-quality product quickly.
- Certified Mold-Free: Before purchasing coffee online, make sure the brand has mold-free certification. If it’s certified, that means every harvest is tested for mold and other contaminants, so you’ll get clean, delicious coffee without harmful toxins.
- Sugar-Free: The best brands take great pains to ensure each cup of coffee is healthful, providing coffee with no added sugar. This factor is applicable for instant blends rather than whole or ground coffee.
- Freshly Roasted: No matter the quality of the coffee, if it’s old it’s no good. Coffee quickly loses its natural flavors and aromas after roasting. Finding beans that have been roasted and packaged recently (within a month or two) is essential.
- Freshly Ground: If you prefer pre-ground coffee, it should be ground and vacuum-sealed immediately for freshness. Ground coffee loses its aromatics faster than whole-bean. When buying ground coffee online ensure it has been ground recently and packaged properly.
How You Can Select the Best Coffee Online for Your Tastes
Feeling utterly overwhelmed by the choices of coffee online? Thankfully, there are some key things that you can bear in mind to make it easier. By understanding the difference between coffee species, it becomes simple to select a blend that suits you.
Robusta vs. Arabica vs. Blend

Several coffee species exist around the world. However, two are the most popular — arabica and robusta. The two species grow in slightly different environments and produce beans with different qualities. You may prefer one or the other or a combination of the two (blend).
Robusta
Coffea robusta plants are larger and harder than Coffea arabica plants. Though the beans themselves are almost identical, robusta tend to have an earthier, darker, and more bitter flavor, and twice as much caffeine. This is divisive but extremely popular in Southeast Asia, where robusta beans have a long history and super strong cups of coffee are sold on street corners.
Robusta is often shunned by coffee enthusiasts in the West because of its robust and naturally bitter flavor profile. However, it’s becoming more popular for its sustainability and as brewing methods improve.
Arabica
Coffea arabica plants are more sensitive. Arabica beans have a higher fat and sugar content than robusta. Their flavor can be more complex and subtle with enhanced natural aromas of citrus and fruit and a nuttier flavor when roasted to a dark.
Arabica has long been the most popular of the two species and modern specialty coffee has a deep adoration for it. Most Western coffee shops will sell specialty arabica coffee.
Blends
A blend of arabica and robusta provides a wonderful balance between the two.
The robusta forms a strong base, with its earthiness, full-bodied flavor, and high caffeine content packing a punch.
Arabica lightens the brew with delicate nutty and citrus notes manifesting as an aftertaste.
If you’re in the mood for something complex, a blend from skilled roasters can be transcendental.
Dark Roast, Medium Roast, & Light Roast
The topic of roasting coffee can be complex, with a whole heap of different chemical processes happening all at once. Let’s keep it simple and sum it up — during roasting, water within the coffee beans evaporates and reduces the level of delicate aromas from the plant.
During roasting, compounds within the bean break down into sugars that caramelize on the outermost layer of the bean — producing the characteristic scent and flavor of coffee.
These two processes mean that an exquisite dark roast can have very little of the bean’s subtle fruity flavors remaining, but the earthy sweetness and bold "roast" flavor is off the charts.
At the other end of the scale, a light roast tends to be less sweet but retains more of the subtle natural flavors of the bean. When brewed slowly, this often manifests as a delicate aroma of citrus fruits, paired with a slight acidity that’s often compared to berries.
A medium roast offers a good middle ground between these two characteristics. Neither a light nor a dark roast is bad, so getting a little of both of those flavors offers a wonderfully delicious experience.
Country of Origin
The country of origin of the beans can impact their final flavor of the bean. The wine world started the concept of terroir — a flavor in the drink that comes from the soil where the grapes were grown. This manifests in coffee, too, with different types of soil adding different flavors and aromas to the beans that grow there.
Countries with volcanic soils are known to be exceptionally good for growing coffee. Vietnam, for instance, has volcanic soil throughout the country and a wide range of different elevations at which coffee can grow. Coffee grown in that volcanic soil can create a unique terroir. The most common notes ascribed to Vietnamese coffee include strong, dark, and rich, with a smooth dark chocolate flavor.
What Makes a Coffee Good?
It's important to remember that what makes any coffee "good" is subjective. Let's run through some quick things to bear in mind when selecting a coffee online. All the measurements we're talking about here are objective, and your opinions of them are the subjective part.
Single-Origin vs. Blends
All coffee beans sold worldwide can generally be broken down into two main categories — single origin and blends. The meaning of these two categories is quite simple, if a bit elastic.
Single Origin Coffee
Single-origin coffee is from one specific location. This could be as large as a country or as small as one particular section of a farmer’s field.
From the location of a single-origin coffee, you'll know the altitude, soil quality, and general climate conditions the crop was grown. When buying single-origin beans online, the brand should state where the coffee was sourced from, how it was grown, and the species used.
Coffee beans from the DaLat region, for example, are 100% arabica, grown at high elevations in the mountainous region of Vietnam. These beans thrive in high altitude, red basaltic soil, and cool air, producing smooth flavor with notes of caramel, blackberry, and stone fruit.
Blends
Single-origin coffee can contain a “blend” of two or more different species that are grown in one particular region. Take Cafely’s Saigon OG for example. This blends robusta, peaberry robusta, and arabica — all from a region of Vietnam with altitudes of 800 to 1600 meters.
However, what's more common is coffee blends made from a variety of beans sourced from different parts of the world.
Coffee blends are typically formed from beans sourced globally. The most obvious benefit of coffee blends is flavor. Blenders deliberately select beans with notes that will work synergistically.
Blends are more consistent than single-origin coffee. Regardless of the seasonal quality of a crop in one area, a blend will taste more or less the same each year.
Beans or Pre-Ground

Generally, coffee will either be sold as whole beans or pre-ground.
Whole-bean coffee stays fresher for longer. Grinding beans increases the amount of surface area that can come into contact with oxygen, causing them to go stale much faster. Therefore, buying whole beans ensures they’re ground fresh, leading to a bright, intense flavor that’s difficult to achieve with pre-ground coffee.
The process of coffee becoming stale comes down to the oils and flavonoids in the coffee becoming oxidized with time. This staling process can be fast — a well-sealed bag of pre-ground coffee typically takes a week or so to lose flavor. However, a well-sealed bag of whole-bean coffee can last for over a month before the flavor begins to deteriorate noticeably.
FAQs: The Best Coffee to Buy Online
Still have questions about the best coffee online? Let’s take a look at the most common questions from across the internet.
1. How to Find The Best Coffee Online?
To find the best coffee online, you'll usually have to go through a number of decisions to narrow things down. We would suggest starting your specialty coffee journey with a blend so that you can identify the different elements you like or don't like.
2. What Makes a Coffee the “Best?”
There are lots of different things to consider when choosing coffee. For instance, you might consider whether to go for single-origin coffee for specific flavors or blend for a wide range of interesting flavors. Many other things also impact these flavors, such as the roast level, the origin location of the beans, and their freshness.
3. How Does the Roast Level Make a Coffee Different?
During roasting, coffee beans lose some water with natural plant chemicals dissolved in them, and their native carbohydrates degrade into simple sugars [1,2]. Lightly roasting coffee produces less sugar while maintaining some of the volatile flavors from the raw bean. Dark roast coffee tends to be richer, earthier, and sweeter.
4. What Country Grows The Best Coffee?
This is an impossible question to answer. For instance, South American coffees are often considered to be citrussy, while African coffees can be a little sweeter. Vietnamese coffee tends to be more intense and bitter.
5. Where Should I Start When Finding Coffee Online?
There's no wrong place to start when finding coffee online. We would gently suggest starting with a blend to give you a honed, deliberate flavor that a coffee professional has chosen. However, that's just our opinion — you could start with a premium arabica coffee for its smooth profile or a bold robusta coffee to experience its intense flavors and higher caffeine content, and draw up your personal tasting notes.
References:
- Redgwell, R. J., Trovato, V., Curti, D., & Fischer, M. (2002). Effect of roasting on degradation and structural features of polysaccharides in Arabica coffee beans. Carbohydrate research, 337(5), 421–431.
- Wang, Z., Zhou, X., Sheng, L., Zhang, D., Zheng, X., Pan, Y., Yu, X., Liang, X., Wang, Q., Wang, B., & Li, N. (2023). Effect of ultrasonic degradation on the structural feature, physicochemical property and bioactivity of plant and microbial polysaccharides: A review. International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, 236, 123924.