Drift Away Coffee Subscription Review

Driftaway Coffee delivers freshly roasted coffee, personalized for your taste, right to your door. Every two weeks you’ll receive freshly roasted whole bean coffee based on your selected preferences, gathered from the initial “Rise & Grind” Kit.

After tasting the coffees in the kit, you’ll tell them what your favorites are and they’ll create a custom box for you. You can opt for 7 ounces every other week, or 11.

Brewing tips!

Coffee profile tasting card. After you fill this in you can enter the results on the site.

The Driftaway Rise and Grind Kit features four offerings each representative of a coffee style, the goal being to tailor your future samples to the style you enjoy best.  The four styles are “Fruity,” “Classic,” “Balanced,” and “Bold.”

Fruity offerings are typically sourced from Africa and are light roasts with lots of floral and fruit notes.  I would expect to see Ethiopian and Kenyan coffees in this family, but Driftaway surprised me with a very unique Rwanda offering that had some flavor notes I’ve never experienced in coffee.  The tangerine top note gave way to a distinct rhubarb sour and a strong and very recognizable tea tannin; had I not ground the beans myself, I would swear there were tea and chicory in the blend.  Reminiscent of a Snapple.

Classic brews are your primarily South American beans that produce the kind of coffee American diners have been serving for a century.  Clean and singular in focus, there are no distracting flowery or smoky flavors, just toasty, mellow flavors like nuts, cocoa, and caramel.  The Nicaraguan exemplar was straightforward with a pronounced and pleasant cocoa base.  Made me think of a gourmet version of Folgers.

Balanced brews are sourced chiefly from Central America and comprise the complex, multi-faceted coffee-club type beans with fruit, citrus, chocolate and other flavors, with interesting acidity and flavor combos.  The Guatemalan in my pack had berry and citrus notes that played on top of a mouth-watering acidity.  The balanced brews strike me as those varieties that exhibited outlier flavors that, though delightful, made them unsuitable for inclusion in mass-production blends that found the Classic style beans to be more conducive to creating a consistent product for mass consumption.  The coffee renaissance has rightfully recognized the Balanced brews as every bit as deserving of attention.

Bold offerings are those most receptive to darker roasting.  They feature the bold, dark, chocolaty, spicy, and smoky beans that make an intriguing cup.  My pack had a dark and bittersweet Columbian brew with roasted nut and chocolate tones.   

Visit Driftaway Coffee to subscribe or find out more.  You can also see all the coffee subscriptions in the subscription box directory.