Atlas Coffee Club Review: Easy to Recommend (Even if Its Bags Aren’t)

Atlas Coffee Club sells itself on promises to take you on a tour of the world one bag of coffee at a time. The pitch is a good one; single-origin coffees shipped right to your door every two to four weeks is an appealing prospect. It’s no small surprise that Atlas really took off when the pandemic hit in 2020. Lockdown might have been bad for our collective mental health (and our bangs, hair color, and ability to socialize like normal humans) but it was great for the coffee subscription business.

Now, in 2024, there’s not a single major publication that covers coffee that doesn’t count Atlas Coffee Club among its favorite coffee subscriptions — for good reason. Mostly good reasons. Okay, it’s complicated. 

First of all, The Coffee Is Amazing

Here’s the thing: I’ve never been disappointed by a bag of Atlas coffee. In fact, just about every time I get a shipment from Atlas, there’s a bag of coffee in there that I can’t shut up about for weeks. My partner and I still talk about a bag of Jamaican Blue Mountain from Atlas we had months ago. Don’t even get me started on the incredible coffees from Yemen. Neither of us have time for that. 

The bags arrive right on time, the coffee smells fresh, and the box always includes detailed information about each region the coffee is from. Whether it was natural processed or washed, the altitude it was grown at, how it was handled before it landed in Atlas’ Austin, Texas roastery. It’s important information to have, and when a coffee company doesn’t provide it, I always wonder what they’re trying to hide. But Atlas usually puts it front and center and I love that for her. 

Atlas offers monthly or bimonthly delivery options for half a bag, single bag, and two bag subscriptions. You can get the coffee ground, whole, or delivered in Keurig or Nespresso compatible pods. Subscriptions are priced based on the size of each delivery, $17 for a 12oz bag, $32 for two 12oz bags. Plus, you get a half off discount on your first order. If you’re not quite sure what you want, there’s a helpful little quiz to guide you through the whole process!

Single Origin versus Single Estate

Unlike other subscriptions, Atlas focuses solely on single-origin coffee. Each bag you get will hail from one specific coffee-producing region at a time. This is good news for those of us who want to experience the unique flavors produced by each region. The more coffees from different regions are mixed together, the more homogenous the flavors become. That’s not always a bad thing, but if you’re looking for memorable coffee — the kind that tastes like you’re biting into a fresh cherry or sucking on a cocoa nib — you really have to go single origin. 

However, “single origin” doesn’t always mean what it seems like it means. It doesn’t mean “single estate,” or “single farm.” It just means those beans from Indonesia all came from somewhere in Indonesia. Which is a step in the right direction for sure, and still yields a damn good bag of coffee with unique flavors you’re not going to get out of Pike Street Blend from Starbucks. But it’s not the furthest a coffee company can go in the year 2024. I’d love to see more information about the individual estates the coffees come from, and some more transparency on how much Atlas pays its growers. 

Atlas does occasionally take steps to highlight the farmers it works with. A couple times in the last year I received packages of coffee with postcards featuring photos of processing facilities at Riverdale Estate in India, and information about the people who actually made the coffee you’re drinking. These illuminating glimpses behind the curtain are a taste of the kind of transparency I would love to see Atlas embrace for every box of its coffee.

Aside from these peeks, Atlas is surprisingly opaque when it comes to the traceability of its coffee. If it’s not on the postcard, you’re out of luck. It’s a curious shortfall for a company that puts forth an image of “hands caked with dirt,” exchanging family photos with growers all over the world, and building schools in Guatemala. 

Great coffee, way, way too many postcards

While I’d love to see more information from Atlas about its individual coffees, and more single estate coffees, every shipment does come with information about the region the coffees are from. The only problem is Atlas provides all this lovely information on a stack of postcards inside each box. 

It’s kitschy and cute most of the time—postcards, traveling the world via coffee, all that jazz. As gimmicks go it’s not bad, but when you inevitably lose some of those postcards you lose the information about those bags of coffee. It’s not on the bag, and it’s often hard to find on the Atlas website. The bags are sometimes completely unlabeled, other times they’ll have the region printed on the side but if you’ve received a flight of different coffees from the same region, it’s really easy to lose track of which one is which. 

Please just tell me what’s in each bag

While we’re talking about the bags, the art on the bags is lovely, but they are treacherous. A bane from a forgotten age, a blight upon Atlas’ otherwise killer coffee. These bags are the kind with the bendy metal strip that’s meant to hold the bag closed. The problem is, that little strip is adhered to the bag with naught but hopes and dreams, and every time I open a new bag of Atlas coffee, that bendy metal strip just falls right off. 

Okay I’ll admit that, Ideally, you should decant your fresh beans into an airtight container as soon as you open them like a good coffee snob. But I’m a bad coffee snob and coffee doesn’t stick around long enough in my house to worry about decanting most of the time and, Atlas please, I just want to close the bags without having to search out a chip clip from my junk drawer.

Speaking of freshness, most specialty coffee you get from a coffee subscription or your local roaster will have a date printed on it that tells you when it was roasted. That’s important information because it basically tells you the shelf life of your coffee. Like I said, I’m a messy bitch, and I’ve had plenty of coffee that’s sat on a shelf for months in its little bag and it’s tasted just fine, but some roasts can turn pretty quickly and start producing off flavors within a matter of weeks. It’s the kind of standard information you just expect to have.

Even coffee bags in your local grocery store will have a roast date printed on them. Atlas doesn’t provide this information per-bag, but on its FAQ page it says the coffee is shipped on the same day it’s roasted. Which is better than nothing, but come on. Just print it on the bag, please — and don’t you dare put the roast date on yet another postcard. 

You might also consider

I’ve personally tested a ton of the best coffee subscriptions. Here are a few that I enjoyed, and a bit about how they stack up compared to Atlas, in case you’re still on the fence.

Think of Trade as your coffee sommelier. By partnering with roasters and cafes all over the US, Trade can ship you a selection of coffees from some of the best roasters around. I love this subscription model because it puts a new set of roasters in front of you every month. It connects you with roasteries you might otherwise have never thought to try.

I first encountered some of my favorite coffee roasters (and at least one on this list) through Trade. The downside is that Trade is not a roaster itself, so the coffee you receive might be a couple days less fresh than it would be if you ordered straight from a roastery itself. Starting at $15/bag, Trade is a bit more affordable than Atlas. Check out my colleague Matt Jancer’s full review of Trade Coffee’s subscription service to learn more.

Partners knows its shit. The roasts are always spot-on, and the blends are so carefully curated that you’d never know they were blends if you didn’t know beforehand. Seriously, more than once I’ve had a cup of a Partners coffee blend and would’ve sworn it was a single origin.

That’s impressive because typically the more coffee beans from different regions are blended together the more samey their flavors become. It’s great for consistency, but you do sometimes lose out on the fruitier, juicier, funkier flavors that you can get from single origins, like the ones offered by Atlas.

TL;DR

Atlas is far from perfect, there’s a lot to critique, and quite a few things I’d love to see change (maybe some locally commissioned art on the coffee bags and better closures for one). But as it stands, it’s one of the handful of coffee subscriptions I regularly recommend to friends and family. Every time a new box shows up at my door, I’m excited to open it. I’m excited to drink it, share it with my partner, and talk about it on the internet. Coffees from Atlas are always memorable, even if they do come with a truly insane number of tiny little postcards. For real, the last box had 14 postcards. What am I supposed to do with these?!