Coffee beans for a bean-to-cup machine

A bean-to-cup machine is only as good as what goes in the hopper. The machine grinds and pours. It does not rescue a stale bag, or a hopper topped up with three leftover blends.

Choosing coffee beans for an office machine comes down to four things: whole, fresh, one coffee, and enough of it.

Whole beans, every time

The hopper is for whole beans. The machine grinds them for each cup, which is the reason to have a bean-to-cup machine in the first place. Pre-ground coffee fades faster and does not belong in the hopper. Whole beans versus ground is that difference in full.

Roast date over best-before

Look for a roast date on the bag. A best-before a year away tells you the coffee is still food. It does not tell you when it was roasted. Supermarket beans are built for a shelf. The practical window is short: order for the month you will drink, not the quarter.

If there is no roast date, assume you cannot tell.

One coffee in the hopper

Pick one coffee and keep it in the machine. A hopper filled with whatever is in the cupboard tastes different every day, and nobody can tell you which bag they liked. If the office wants a change, finish the bag and change on purpose.

Arico sells freshly roasted café-quality Arabica, roasted locally. On this site, café-quality means our beans in that machine. It is not a promise about every café on the street.

Enough for the month

Kilograms, not 200-gram bags. At about 7 grams a cup as a planning figure, a kilogram is in the region of 140 cups. Ordering by the kilogram is the arithmetic. An office of twenty is the working example, which lands around 6 or 7 kilograms a month.

Running out mid-week is how a hopper ends up with supermarket beans in it. A monthly delivery keeps the order on the same calendar as the drinking.

Beans with the machine, or without

You can buy beans from the shop without taking a machine. Shop orders ship the next day, by the kilogram. If the office has no machine yet, or has one on a hire contract, the free machine is the other route: the Saeco Royal Plus, servicing, and tech support at $0 while you order beans each month, from as little as 40 cents a cup.

Whichever way you buy, the rule for the hopper is the same. Whole, dated, one coffee, a month at a time.