Coffee: A Buyer’s Guide to Types, Brands and Brewing

Coffee is a brewed drink made from roasted and ground coffee beans, the seeds of the Coffea plant, valued for its flavour and caffeine. In the UK it is sold as whole beans for grinding, pre-ground coffee for filter brewing, instant granules, or capsules for capsule machines, with taste varying by bean, roast and brew method.

That single sentence hides a lot of decisions: which species, which roast, which format. This guide works through all three, using the products we pack and ship every week, and the ratios we use when we are setting a machine up for a customer.

What Is Coffee? Beans, Roasts and Formats Explained

Coffee cherries grow on the Coffea plant across a belt either side of the equator. The seeds inside are dried, roasted and ground before brewing. Everything between the farm and the cup changes how it tastes, but three factors do most of the work: the species of bean, how dark it is roasted, and the format you buy it in.

Arabica and robusta

Arabica grows at higher altitudes, ripens slowly and gives a sweeter, more acidic cup with more aromatic complexity. It is also more fragile to farm, which is why it costs more.

Robusta is hardier, grows lower down, carries roughly double the caffeine and brings body, bitterness and a thicker, longer-lasting crema. Plenty of espresso blends combine the two deliberately. A 60/40 split is not a compromise, it is a recipe for crema and texture that pure arabica struggles to match in milk drinks.

Roast levels

Light roasts keep more of the origin character: fruit, florals, brighter acidity. They suit filter, pour-over and cafetiere, where the water has time to extract gently. Medium roasts sit in the middle and work across espresso and filter without much fuss. Dark roasts push into chocolate, toasted nut and caramelised sugar, lose some acidity, and stand up well to milk. Most commercial espresso blends sold in the UK sit medium to medium-dark for exactly that reason.

The four formats, compared

Most of the buying mistakes we see are format mistakes rather than flavour ones. Someone orders beans for a filter brewer, or paper pods for a capsule machine. The table below is the short version.

One clarification is worth holding on to, because it causes more wasted orders than anything else. An ESE pod is a 44mm paper-wrapped puck for a traditional espresso machine fitted with an ESE-compatible basket. A capsule is a sealed plastic or aluminium unit built for one specific capsule machine system. In everyday speech people say “pod” and mean “capsule”. The two are not interchangeable, and neither goes anywhere near a bean-to-cup machine.

Summit: Our Own Range for Espresso, Filter and Instant

Summit is our own label, put together by people who install and service machines all week. That shapes the range: blends that behave predictably in commercial grinders, bag sizes that match real usage, and a cost per cup that still leaves margin on a flat white.

The best seller: Grande Crema

Summit Grande Crema Coffee Beans (1kg) at £17.25 ex VAT is the bag that leaves the warehouse most often. It is a medium-dark blend built for crema and body, with cocoa, caramel and roasted hazelnut character, and it holds its own under milk rather than disappearing. Dial in at 18g in, 36g out, 27 to 30 seconds, then adjust the grind a notch at a time. Too sour, grind finer. Too bitter and drying, grind coarser.

A busy café will get through a 1kg bag in a day or two, so freshness looks after itself. A small office with a bean-to-cup might take a fortnight, which is still well inside the window.

Instant for the staff kitchen

Not every drink point justifies a machine. Meeting rooms, site offices and out-of-hours cover are better served by a jar than by a bean hopper nobody cleans.

Summit South American Blend Instant Coffee (250g) at £8.95 ex VAT covers that job, and keeping it under the same brand as your beans simplifies ordering. Where a site wants something closer to ground coffee character in a jar, the Summit range sits alongside Kenco Millicano Americano Wholebean Instant Coffee (300g) at £17.95 ex VAT, which blends microground beans into the granules.

Storing it properly

Coffee has three enemies: oxygen, light and heat. Moisture makes a fourth. Get storage right and a bag tastes the same on day twelve as it did on day two.

• Keep beans in an airtight container, in a cupboard, at room temperature.
• Do not put coffee in the fridge. Temperature swings pull moisture into the beans.
• Buy a bag size you can finish in two to four weeks once opened.
• In a café or office, decant into the hopper only what you will use that day.

Birchall: The Tea to Stock Alongside Your Coffee

Birchall does not roast coffee. It earns a place here because almost every coffee order comes with someone who would rather have tea, and a weak tea offer undermines an otherwise good drinks menu.

A British tea specialist since 1872

Birchall is family-owned with roots going back to 1872 and specialises in black teas from East Africa. Its Great Rift Breakfast Blend, sourced from the Rift Valley, has taken a Great Taste Award every year for well over a decade.

Sustainability credentials that stand up

Every Birchall tea bag is plant-based. The Prism and Everyday bags suit industrial composting, so they belong in council food waste collections that accept them, while string-and-tag bags can go on a home compost heap. All Birchall products are certified carbon neutral, and the company’s Wiltshire factory is fully solar-powered, generating more renewable electricity than it uses.

Picking the right format

Table service and hotel breakfast tend to want individually enveloped bags, because they look right on a saucer and travel well on a tray. Offices usually take tagged or everyday bags in larger boxes. High-volume catering runs on one-cup bags, where speed of service decides it. The full Birchall range covers all three.

Finishing Touches: Syrups, Toppings and Milk

Margin improves fastest at the add-on stage. A 10ml shot of syrup costs pennies, usually carries a 40p to 50p upcharge, and turns one drink on your menu into four.

Flavoured syrups

Caramel, hazelnut and vanilla do the bulk of the work. Simply Caramel Syrup and Simply Hazelnut Syrup are both £3.25 ex VAT. The sugar-free vanilla and caramel versions are £6.99 ex VAT for a litre, which matters more than it used to now that most cafés get asked weekly.

Fit a Simply Syrup Bottle Portion Pump at £3.25 ex VAT to each bottle. Free-pouring is inconsistent and expensive, and a pump gives you a measured 10ml every time.

Topping and milk powder

Summit Cappuccino Topping (750g) at £7.05 ex VAT finishes a cappuccino and costs almost nothing per cup. Keep the shaker by the pass rather than at the machine, so it does not take on steam.

For vending and bean-to-cup points without a fridge line, granulated skimmed milk powder is the practical answer: Summit Silver Granulated Skimmed Milk Powder (500g) at £5.25 ex VAT, or Milfresh Silver Granulated Skimmed Milk at £5.50 ex VAT. Both dissolve cleanly in machine canisters and keep far longer than fresh.

The Kit to Pair With Your Coffee

Good beans only go so far. Two pieces of kit decide whether a cup is good or merely acceptable: the machine and, more than people expect, the grinder.

The machine

For home espresso, look for PID temperature control, a group head that holds heat steadily, and a shot timer so you can repeat what worked. Our home espresso machines cover that bracket. Start around 93°C for medium-dark blends and move a degree at a time.

Running a café or an office changes the calculation. A single-group home machine will not survive a lunchtime rush, and a bean-to-cup suits an office far better than a traditional machine nobody is trained on. Volume, not budget, should drive that decision.

The grinder and the upkeep

A grinder that cannot adjust finely enough caps how good your espresso gets, regardless of what goes in the hopper. Purge a gram or two after any grind change, and clean the burrs on a schedule, because coffee oils go rancid and stale oil taints every shot that follows.

Backflush an espresso machine with water after each session and with detergent a few times a week. Scale is the longer-term threat, particularly across the south east where water is hard, so filter the supply and descale on a realistic interval for your volume.

Choosing and Brewing Your First Coffee

There is no need to taste twenty bags before committing. Narrow it down with three questions, then brew.

• What machine do you have? Beans for espresso and bean-to-cup, ground for filter and cafetiere, instant for a kettle, capsules only for the system they were made for.
• Milk or black? Milk drinks want medium-dark with body. Black coffee gives lighter roasts room to show their origin character.
• How much will you get through? Buy what you will finish in two to four weeks, and order more often rather than more at once.

Then pull one shot at 18g in, 36g out, and time it. Under 20 seconds it will taste sour and thin, so grind finer. Over 35 seconds it will taste bitter and dry, so grind coarser. Change one thing at a time and write down what you did, because memory is unreliable at 7am. Once the shot is right, leave the grind alone for the rest of the day unless the weather or the bag changes.

Pick one bag, brew it this week, and note the grind, the dose and how it tasted. Then try a second against it. Two bags, properly compared, teach you more than a shelf of them bought on a guess.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between arabica and robusta coffee?

Arabica beans grow at higher altitudes, give a smoother cup with more acidity and sweetness, and cost more. Robusta is hardier, higher in caffeine, and brings body and a thicker crema, which is why many espresso blends combine both rather than using one alone.

Is instant coffee the same as ground coffee?

No. Instant coffee is brewed, then dried into granules that dissolve in hot water, so no grinding or filtering is needed. Ground coffee is roasted beans milled to a size suited to a specific method, such as filter or cafetiere, and needs proper brewing equipment.

How long does an opened bag of coffee stay fresh?

Whole beans hold their flavour for around two to four weeks after opening if kept airtight, away from light and heat, and out of the fridge. Ground coffee loses aroma faster, within a week or two, because more surface area is exposed to air.

What is the difference between an ESE pod and a capsule?

An ESE pod is a 44mm paper-wrapped puck of ground coffee used in traditional espresso machines fitted with an ESE-compatible basket. A capsule is a sealed plastic or aluminium unit made for a specific capsule machine system. The two are not interchangeable.

How much coffee should I use per cup?

For espresso, a common starting point is 18g of ground coffee in, yielding roughly 36g out in 25 to 30 seconds. For a cafetiere or filter, use around a 1:15 to 1:16 ratio, roughly 20g of coffee to 300ml of water, adjusting to taste.

Ready to order your first bag? Orders placed before 4:30pm Monday to Friday are dispatched the same day via DPD, with free next working day delivery on orders over £69 ex VAT to mainland UK. Shop the full coffee range