One thing you might know about a great many people is that they drink coffee. Coffee gifts are both thoughtful and practical — even coffee the recipient doesn’t prefer makes excellent backup or emergency coffee in a pinch. To that end, coffee gift baskets may just be one of my favorite Christmas gifts to give.
With a focus on Seattle-based roasters, this gift box features 16 different coffees from artisanal coffee outfits. Bean Box works exclusively with 23 tiny companies based in the coffee capital of the U.S., including Slate, True North, Seattle Coffee Works, Caffe Vita, and my old neighborhood roaster, Broadcast.
Growing regions represented in this offering include Ethiopia, Kenya, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia, Panama, Brazil, and Hawaii, served up in 16 1.8 ounce bags. An excellent sampler for the connoissuer.
Angels’ Cup is an online tasting club, based in Brooklyn. The idea is that you receive four different coffees and blindly taste them, trying to see if you can identify the coffee. All of the coffees they use are called “third-wave,” which means that they are single-origin and medium roasted to preserve the full spectrum of flavors in each coffee. There’s a companion app you can download to record your tasting notes, and every box comes with a cheat sheet. Each week, they ship four new featured coffees to Amazon, so once the person you buy this for is hooked on the experience, they can buy future boxes to keep up with the fun. Each box contains four 2.75 ounce samples that arrive at Amazon’s warehouse within days of being roasted.
If you’re gifting coffee to someone who has yet to invest in their own coffee-making setup, this clever gift set from Civilized Coffee fits the bill nicely. While some of the other coffee gift baskets on this list fill out with treats, this is strictly business, focused on coffee and the means to prepare it.
Included in this set is a Bodum French Press, a Bodum Coffee Grinder, a coffee scoop and 12 ounces of Civilized Coffee’s Kenyan whole bean blend, which is a light blonde roast, perfect for daily drinking.
The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is a mid-sized coffee shop operating worldwide, in a similar mode to Starbucks. This gift box includes eight ounces of their whole bean House Blend, in addition to some other treats: Ghiradelli hot chocolate, a branded mug, and two pieces of Nonni’s almond chocolate biscotti.
Of course, there are many great coffees in the world. Even the more commonly known, highly productive growing regions give us excellent, flavorful coffee everyday. This gift pack includes Kona as well, but celebrates the big hitters of the coffee world. In this box, you get 12 ounces of Indonesian Sumatra Mandheling, 12 ounces of Ethiopian Harrar, seven ounces of Mulvadi 100% Kona, and 12 ounces of Organic Fair Trade Colombian. These are the stalwarts of the coffee world and this gift box provides an awful lot of actual coffee compared to many options on this list.
Barrel aging coffee adds a new flavor dimension to the beans. I’ve had a few of these over the years and really enjoyed the interesting flavor experience. This set brings you three four ounce bags of the following coffees: Uprising, a Sumatra Lintong aged in Sons Of Liberty stout style American whiskey barrels; Battle Cry, an Ethiopian coffee aged in Sons of Liberty rye barrels; and Thomas Tew Rum, aged in the eponymous rum barrels. A 12 ounce mug is also included.
Waka Coffee is a cut above, offering an instant coffee that tastes every bit as good as brewed. While instant coffee is often looked down upon, partly due to a long history of just freeze-drying some remnants of beans and calling it coffee, there is, indeed some enjoyable instant coffee out there.
This gift set is aimed at outdoor adventurers, but can be useful for anyone without access to a coffee machine and a grinder. It includes 3.5 ounces (or about 35 servings) of Colombian instant coffee, eight single-serve packs for purses and bags, and a Waka-branded MiiR 12 ounce tumbler. You can opt for a decaffeinated option, as well.
This basket includes not only coffee, as you would imagine, but also tea for a full complement of hot beverages perfect for Christmas mornings as well as all throughout the year. This gift basket includes all of the following, in addition to a 20 ounce stainless steel travel mug:
Starbucks Ground Coffee Pike Place Roast (2.5oz)
Starbucks Ground Coffee Veranda Blend (2.5oz)
Lindt Lindor Milk Truffles (2pc)
Starbucks Hot Cocoa (1oz)
Jo’s Milk Chocolate Honey Graham (1oz)
Starbucks VIA Latte Caffe Mocha (1pc)
Teavana English Breakfast Black Tea (1pc)
Teavana Modern Earl Grey Flavoured Black Tea (1pc)
Let’s face it: half the fun of gift basket or box is the drama of the packaging. This item revels in that, packaging 12 1.5 ounce packages of coffee into a faux-leather “travel journal.” The journal is a passport of sorts to 12 different growing regions around the world, with enough coffee to make one pot each. Varieties include: Colombian Supremo, Costa Rican Tarrazzu, Kona Blend, Jamaican Blend, Haitian Bleu, Indian Mysore, Sumatra Mandheling, Guatemala Antigua, Ethiopian Harrar, Mexican Altura Coatepec, Brazil Santos, and Zimbabwe Chipinga. A great way to get into identifying your favorite region.
If you want something a little more thematic for the holidays, try this fun little set. These are latte mixes akin to hot cocoa rather than traditional coffee beans and are packaged in festive boxes to tie into the theme of the season.
You get one beverage each of: Cappucino Latte, Peppermint Latte, Breakfast Blend Latte, Cafe au Lait Latte, French Vanilla Latte, Irish Cream Latte, Peppermint Latte, Mint Mocha Latte, and Gingerbread Latte. Hot cocoa and tea sets are also available.
If you like this idea and want to pair it with something, you might try these similar flavors packed into cups that just require the addition of water to drink.
If you want somthing a bit larger to give, try this option. This is another Starbucks-centric basket, featuring: 16 ounces of Caffe Veranda light roast, 16 ounces of Pike Place medium roast, Starbucks double chocolate and peppermint hot chocolate, J&M caramel sea salt cookies, vanilla bean sables, Madyson’s marshmallows maddy melts, Starbucks VIA instant caramel latte, a large assortment of Tazo teas, and two mugs.
Among all the world’s fantastic coffee, three famous growing regions tend to rise above the rest: Jamaican Blue Mountain, Kopi Luwak, and Hawaiian Kona.
This box focuses on the last of these, packaging five, two-ounce bags of Certified Organic Rain Forest Alliance Fair Trade Kona blends into one sampler. The blends include Volcano, a hearty dark roast, Plantation, a medium roast, Private Reserve Diamond, a lovely medium-light roast, Gold, a medium-dark roast, and Platinum, a very light roast.
An excellent gift to give to someone who has wanted to try coffee from this area.
This gift set focuses on single-origin whole coffee beans. So much so that each four ounce sample comes with a card that talks about the grower and the region from which the beans originate.
You get a sample of a light roast from small farmers in Ethiopia, a medium roast from Honduras RAOS, a light roast from Colombia Cauca and a dark roast from Guatemala Waykan.
In addition, Driftaway uses entirely compostible packaging materials, and virtually all of their operations are carbon-neutral. This coffee gift combines both delicious beans and sustainability for those on your list looking for both.
Perfect for the indecisive or curious coffee fan! The real key in coffee-basket-gift-giving success is that it’s an opportunity for the recipient to try a variety of flavors or styles they wouldn’t normally buy in the normal course of their daily lives.
This treasure chest of ground coffee is stuffed with 12 different flavors in 1.75 ounce samplers, including: Café Caramel Cream, Colombian Supremo, Sinful Sundae, Caramel Pecan Pie, Chocolate Raspberry, Hazelnut, Breakfast Blend, Crème Brulee, Beanery Blend, Amaretto, English Toffee and Cream, and Hawaiian Coconut.
Despite the silly name, this gift basket (well, crate) takes a slightly different approach to a coffee-themed gift. It offers up an entire breakfast with which coffee can be enjoyed, all packed into a pine wood crate for a rustic experience.
This coffee gift basket includes the following:
12 ounces of ground coffee
8 ounces of blueberry bourbon jam
Three sampler maple syrup bottles
One box of chocolate chip pancake mix
14 ounces of dry cured bacon
While the syrup included is almost assuredly for the pancakes, I would also urge the recipient to try putting maple syrup in their coffee because it is delicious.
Here’s a gift set with a somewhat interesting presentation: a burlap bag, just as the unroasted coffee beans would be delivered to the roaster. In this set, you get six 3.2 ounce samplers of the following: Sumatra, Costa Rican, Guatemalan, Espresso, Colombian and Good Morning.
If sampler sizes won’t cut it for you gift, give this box with three 12 ounce bags of coffee. These include: Pablo’s Pride Guatemala, a medium-dark roast that is smooth and with low acidity; Rocco’s Classic Itallian Espresso, a blend of espresso roasted beans from Colombia, Sumatra, and Brazil; Char Beanz Dark Coffee, a Full City roast that is dark and smokey.
If the animal lover in your life also loves coffee, consider this offering from Sillybean. In it, you get eight 1.5 ounce samplers with appropriately silly names: “Wet Nose Nudge” Columbian, “Muddy Dog” Caramel Mudslide, “Naughty Dog” Dark Roast, “Begging Dog” Dutch Chocolate Caramel, ”Nutty Dog” Southern Pecan, “Crazy Dog” Jamaican Me Loco, “Salty Dog” Salted Caramel, and “Morning Yip” Medium blend.
Based on South Florida, Koffee Kult is a small, but growing, roaster that focuses on extreme consistency from batch to batch. Their coffee makes an excellent gift because so much time going into sourcing the beans to create their blends. This gift box includes one 16 ounce bag of Dark Roast, one 16 ounce bag of Medium Roast, and a Koffee Kult travel mug. Give it to the hardcore coffee drinker in your life.
The second of the legendary coffees of the world is kopi luwak, or civet coffee, and it has a pretty strange method of coming to be a consumable beverage. The cherries of the coffee tree must be eaten by the Asian palm civet, whereupon fermentation of the beans occurs in the digestive tract. The voided beans are then collected, washed, and roasted as normal coffee, which results in a particular flavor profile some people swear by. This particular gift set features one pound of Philippine, canopy shade grown robusta beans in four hermetically sealed bags, which come in a jute gift tote bag. If you want to give a gift that’s a cut above, try this.
Here’s another, yet smaller, Starbucks-based option. For coffee, this one includes Breakfast Blend, House Blend, and Sumatra or Cafe Estima, depending on the package. The rest is picked right from the counter at Starbucks and includes: Walker’s shortbread cookies, biscotti, hot chocolate, a caramel wafer, and two mugs with the logo stamped into them. Simple and to the point.
Coffee was introduced to Italy in the 1500s and since then, they have developed a singular coffee culture known the world over. Coffee consumption there is centered around espresso, but these beans, which are roasted in Lake Garda, Italy, will brew up nicely in any coffee maker and for any style.
Included in this set are four seven ounce bags of their blends. Each has their own flavor profile, defined by the roaster as follows:
Venezia Blend: Fragrant, Sweet and Berry-like
Roma Blend: Smooth, Mellow and Nut-like
Napoli Blend: Rich, Strong, Smoky, Malty and Dark Chocolate-like
Decaf Firenze Blend: Full Bodied, Lightly Spicy and Cocoa-like
This set is available in both whole beans and ground, depending on your preference for gifting.
This snack-based basket pairs the Coffee Masters blends with a few interesting choices for coffee time. Included are three one-pot coffee packs, KingofPOP cinnamon and brown sugar kettle corn, caramel wafers, white chocolate cranberry cookies, and vanilla wafer rolls. As far as we can tell, the pictured mug is not included, but you could easily grab a mug to add to it.
This coffee gift set focuses on four different roasts originating near the town of Armenia, Colombia. All the beans are grown on a 100-year-old farm. Amor is a medium-bodied roast with mild acidity; Graditud is deeper and softer with low acidity; Courage is sweet and intense with notable fruity notes; Alegria is dark roasted with pleasing bitter notes.
