Pact Coffee Review. The Ultimate Guide to Pact Coffee – 7 Years in the Making.

 

Pact Coffee.

This is my honest, customer review of the coffee subscription service from Pact Coffee, one of the first UK coffee subscriptions, and among the most popular coffee subscriptions in the UK. I emphasise “customer review”, as signed up for the Pact Coffee subscription in October 2015, and I remained a subscription customer of pact for years until the end of 2021.

Pact Coffee Discount Codes

Pact Coffee are currently offering these discount codes exclusively for coffeeblog readers:

Free Cafetiere Worth £37 With Any Subscription: COFFEEBLOGCAF

 

I no longer have a pact coffee subscription, but that's nothing to do with their product or service, I had their subscription and various others before I had my own coffee firm, since setting up The Coffeeworks I don't have a need for other coffee subscriptions, although lots of people send me coffee to try & I love trying loads of different coffees whenever I get the chance.

Getting back to my pact coffee review, I think this is probably the longest term review of Pact Coffee online, meaning the review that was written over the longest period of time by someone with a pact subscription, as I wrote the post initially not long after I first started buying coffee from Pact via subscription, in 2015, and then I updated the post over a number of years as I continued with the Pact subscription.

What's that you say, you'd like me to prove how long I had the Pact Coffee Subscription? OK then ;-).

Here are my first orders with pact coffee back in 2015:

Some of my more recent subscription orders with pact coffee in 2020:

Pact coffee orders in 2020.

Here are some of my most recent pact coffee subscription orders from the end of 2021.

pact coffee orders

 

So you can see now that I'm not just writing thinly disguised marketing drivel and calling it a review, I'm writing about a subscription I had for a number of years.

All of the reviews you'll ever read on coffeeblog and on my YouTube channel, are 100% honest USER reviews based on my actually having spent some real time using the product or service, and I wouldn't dream of reviewing something if this wasn't the case. 

Anyway, that's enough background, let's get on with it:

Pact Coffee Subscription Review

Back in 2015, I was just getting into speciality coffee & the home barista thing. I'd been a coffee drinker for almost as long as I can remember, my early memories of coffee involving coarse fishing locally as a kid, always with a flask of coffee. But by mid-2015 I was getting more and more into speciality coffee, coffee had begun to turn into a hobby or even obsession ;-), and I decided to start blogging about it.

At that time I'd began to hear about coffee subscriptions, and to me, it sounded like a great idea. Not just from the perspective of keeping stocked up, but I read something (I can't remember now where I read it) about a firm call pact coffee that were sending out different coffees, allowing the customer to try various different coffees & then to stick to their favourite if preferred. This seemed like a great idea to me, so I jumped onto their website & signed up. 

Pact Coffee Discount for Coffeeblog Readers!

 

Someone making espresso with an Aeropress.

Pact Coffee is currently offering the following discount codes:

Signing Up

The sign up process was very straightforward, and I think this is one of the reasons that Pact became one of the leading subscriptions early on and have remained so, they have a very user friendly website, and signing up isn't a ball-ache in any way.

I don't know about you, but I often find that ordering online or signing up as a customer, can involve unnecessary steps, daft security prompts, and I have often bailed out of ordering a product of service because they've annoyed the heck out of me before I've even placed my first order ;-).

I'm not all that impatient, I don't think, but I'm just used to being able to do things quickly and easily online, I think we all are these days. The pact sign up process is slick & well thought out, I was impressed with it back in 2015, and I've been through the sign up process again more recently just to see if it's changed, and it's even better now in my humble opinion. 

First, you'll be asked if you want bags of coffee or coffee pods. Don't worry, if you want both, you can set up a separate subscription for the other. 

Pact Coffee Sign Up.

If you're choosing coffee beans rather than pods, you'll also be asked to select roast type:

Pact Coffee Signup - Roast Selection.

Again if you're signing up for a coffee beans subscription and not a coffee pods subscription, you'll be asked to choose from whole beans or a range of different grind sizes if signing up for a pre-ground subscription. 

Pact coffee subscription sign up - grind size.

This is one of the areas that pact coffee excels, by the way, rather than offering just a couple of pre-ground options, they offer fine, medium fine, medium & coarse, which is a good selection for pre-ground. Having said that, I wouldn't recommend pre-ground coffee at all, especially not for espresso. I would very highly recommend investing in a grinder, see my best budget coffee grinders post and also best manual coffee grinders

Pre-ground for brew methods such as Aeropress, filter & cafetiere, is kind of OK. The only real negative here is freshness, as you just can't get fresher than freshly ground, freshly roasted coffee beans. Coffee begins to deteriorate quickly once it's ground, it stays fresher for longer in whole bean form. 

Pre-ground for espresso though just doesn't work, in my humble opinion, from experience. The issue is that you need to fine tune the grind size to “dial in” with each coffee bean, in order to get the best from each coffee. If you don't do this, you're not going to experience the best that this coffee has to offer, and you may have well gone for lower quality, cheaper coffee.

To me buying among the highest quality coffee beans from a subscription service like this, and then using pre-ground coffee for espresso leading to over or under extracted coffee (nearly always under) is completely pointless. Anyway, I digress – I do that! ;-).

The next step is something that they didn't have back when I initially signed up for the pact coffee subscription, and that is to choose a coffee range. House, select or micro-lot.

Pact Coffee Review.

 

If you select “house” you'll get the same coffee each month, the Pact coffee house blend. It's a good quality coffee though, It's not going to be anything else with coffee expert Will Corby being behind it.

Will is Pact Coffee's head of coffee, and this is someone who really knows their stuff, as you'd expect with the title “head of coffee” for a company like Pact Coffee. Midlands Barista Champion 2010, London/South East Barista Champion 2011, previously coffee buyer for Mercanta, head judge of the UK Barista Championships, and cup of excellence international judge – this isn't a guy who's going to be involved in anything other than great coffee.

I personally prefer the other two ranges, and the reason for that is because I like to know exactly what varietal I'm drinking, exactly where the coffee is from in terms of origin, which specific farm it's from, even better – exactly which process was used to process the coffee, and I like variety too. 

What I've found over the years is that my knowledge of coffee has developed, partly due to blogging about it, but also due to tasting a wide range of different coffees and knowing as much as possible about the coffee I'm drinking. Over time you become familiar with the different flavours you'll get from different coffee origins, the difference that the process tends to make to the flavour and aroma, and your palate will develop over time in a way that wouldn't be possible if you were drinking the same blend constantly of nice tasting coffee that you really don't know much about.

Both the micro-lot and select ranges provide some really nice, interesting coffees, by the way. The difference between the two is that the slightly more expensive micro-lot range includes higher cost, rare coffees. 

Next, you'll choose your order frequency, and they've got a really flexible slider for this now, you can drag it to select anywhere from 2 days to 60 days, in one-day increments, which is amazing! I do wish we could do that with our subscription at cworks, sadly we're not a multi-million pound turnover company ;-), and stuff like this costs a lot to be able to offer!

Pact Coffee Review - Frequency.

Then, you'll go through to checkout and the first coffee is chosen for you.  This is a change from how they used to do it, you used to be able to select your first coffee. You can't do that now, the first coffee is chosen for you. 

Once you've set up your subscription, the subscription management that you can do from your account page is really slick and very flexible, you can pause or cancel your subscription at any time.

Reliability

The Pact coffee subscription is VERY reliable, they use royal mail 1st class for micro-lot and select, and 2nd class for the house coffee subscription. In all this time, they've never once messed up, their dispatch is like clockwork. 

There was only ever one issue with a package not arriving. They send you an email to let you know when your coffee is about to be dispatched, so when I'd not received it a few days later I thought an error must have been made somewhere, no one is perfect, these things happen. So I let them know, and they apologised and sent me a replacement straight away, and a couple of days later I ended up getting both bags, at which point I discovered it was a mistake by Royal Mail and not by Pact Coffee. 

In case you're wondering, yes I did own up to Pact & let them know that I'd ended up with both bags ;-), they thanked me for my honesty and very kindly told me to keep the other bag at no extra charge. 

Coffee Quality

I never had any complaints about the coffees I received via my Pact Coffee subscription. Obviously, I had some coffees that I enjoyed more than others, which is always going to happen when you're experiencing different coffees, from different origins, different roast profiles etc., but I never had a “bad” coffee from Pact.

Support

As soon as I signed up for the Pact Coffee subscription back in 2015, I got an email from a member of the Pact team letting me know they were my “coffee wing-person” and to get in touch with them directly with any issues.

I remember that the first time they sent coffee to me, they sent me an email to check I received it OK, and to ask if I was happy with it. I then missed a call from a number I didn't recognise and then received a text to let me know it was pact coffee just giving me a bell to make sure I'd received my first bag of coffee from them OK.

This wasn't an automated SMS service either, I replied to them, and they sent me a personal SMS reply. Really impressive. OK, they're a much bigger company than they were back then, but I did have contact with support a few times over the six years or so that I had subscriptions with them, and I never had an issue.

Is This Another Subscription I'll Forget to Cancel?

This is what I always tend to think when I'm signing up for any kind of subscription. Quite often (for instance with software) I've intended to try some subscription or other for a month, and months later discovered that I'm still paying for it – this is especially true of special offers where I've signed up free for the first month or something. 

I very much doubt this would happen with the Pact Coffee subscription. They email you to remind you when your next coffee is soon to dispatch, giving you the opportunity each time to pause or cancel the plan, and pausing, amending or cancelling the plan altogether is very simple to do, as I showed earlier. 

Could Anything be Improved?

Initially, the only thing I wasn't blown away by, if I'm honest, was the choice. They didn't have the three ranges initially, and they didn't have as many different coffees, so I was regularly getting the same coffee. Not a huge deal, but I do like variety, and some of my other favourite coffee subscriptions (see my best coffee subscriptions post, I have a few!) gave more variety.

But this is something that they improved upon over time, and now there's a lot of choice and variety with the select range. 

Should You Sign up For the Pact Coffee Subscription?

As someone who's had the subscription with Pact Coffee now for just over four and a half years, I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It's a great subscription, it runs literally like clockwork, it's a doddle to sign up, you have complete control over your ordering, the coffee is great, the variety is great (if you go for the select plan), they look after their coffee farmers, and they look after their customers.

Life is like a box of chocolates, so join my Brew Time list, subscribe to my YouTube Channel, try my coffee at The Coffeeworks (use discount code coffeebotherers), follow me on Twitter & Instagram, follow the coffeeblog FaceBook page, and that’s all I have to say about that. 

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