Angel’s Cup Coffee Subscription aims to bring a variety of roasters to your doorstep.  They aren’t the only one, but they are the best.   If you are interested in getting freshly roasted, quality small batch coffee delivered to your little kitchen many places would like to be your coffee servant via your local post office.  That alone is amazing.

What Angel’s Cup does better is that it takes coffee subscription to an entirely new ambition.  This mom and pop Brooklyn-based start-up aims to develop your palate with an easy to use app and a set of blind tasting cards.

There are several levels of membership, of course, but I suggest you start with the simply cupping flight.  You receive four coffees (from two different roasters who contribute two each) in carefully measured 32g bags–you can even get it delivered pre-ground– on either a weekly or bi-weekly schedule.

The cupping flight is my membership level:  I brew one roast a day with a V60 coffee maker.  When I enter the number on the coffee’s sample pouch into their app I am led through a variety of prettily designed prompts, asking me the color of the coffee, the aroma on a flavor wheel, the taste in terms of aftertaste, complexity, bitterness, sweetness, the coffee’s acidity, body, flavor or defects.  Finally at the end you rank on a scale of 1-10 your enjoyment.  You can compare your take on the coffee with the community (other coffee tasters who’ve used the app ) or the roastmaster.  Not feeling like all of this tech is your speed?  You can take it offline.  The coffee also come with a tasting note card that reveals the coffee’s origin, processing, roaster, and Angel Cup’s flavor notes.  On one side of the card is the coffee number; the other side shows the coffee’s information.

This whole process is not only a great way to discover new coffee, but also a serves as a sort of correspondence course in coffee cupping!

Don’t want to go to all of this trouble and just want the best of the lot?  Angel’s Cup offers a one-12oz-bag a week subscription where the highest ranked coffees on the app are delivered to you–it’s called their All Stars subscription.  

Looking to get friends in on the game?  You can get the coffees that I’ve been tasting in the coffee flight membership in higher quantities paired with the same blind tasting process via the cards and app in a subscription called The Black Box.  

The duo behind this carefully curated and crowd-sourced delivery service is Jeff Borack and Abby Salazar.  Jeff and Abby are growing a family as well as a business in their Brooklyn abode.  As of publication, they have close to 1000 subscribers. Like many a coffee geek turned entrepreneur story in New York, their story starts with a disillusionment with a finance job-hustle.  Jeff worked in finance was interested in supporting start-ups financially.  In December 2014, he and Abby began Angel’s Cup after Jeff discovered a whiskey tasting subscription service that he felt he could improve upon.  Now, they ship about 400 flights a week from their apartment putting in about 32 labor hours of love for each shipping.  For each coffee shipment, they have perhaps forty roasts that they’ve tasted and logged cupping notes for. Thus, even these select roasts are a sort of all star assortment in themselves curated by Jeff and Abby.

Angel’s Cup has perhaps the largest inventory of cupping notes for roasters across America!   They’ve found a way to source the passion that roasters are bringing to single origin coffee all across America and then to empower their subscribers with tools that allow coffee geeks everywhere to grow and share their experiences.

I cannot say enough good things about Angel’s Cup. I’m not paid by them or endorsed by them in any way.  I just happen think they are the coolest thing in coffee at the moment.