Onyx Coffee Lab Subscription Review: Savoring Perfection

Sometimes it can be hard to find truly good coffee that meets all of the highest standards. So, when you do find it, you’re gonna want to stick with it! Subscribing to a coffee service is one of the best things you can do if you’re a frequent coffee drinker.

Onyx Coffee Lab is probably one of my favorite coffee roasters that offer subscriptions because they put a ton of care into their products. You can see this in their branding, their website, and the beyond-delicious taste of every brew!

They also make sure that their coffee is fully traceable by showcasing every detail of each bag of beans, even how they score and what price they were bought at.

Onyx Coffee Lab: Company History/Overview

Onyx Coffee Lab was founded in 2012 by Jon Allen and Andrea Allen, who started the brand based on their motto “Never Settle for Good Enough.” This saying is what has fueled the company to grow into what it is today.

In everything they do, Onyx works hard to provide only the best care and service when it comes to coffee. They source only the best coffees from around the world, putting up the highest standards for score and taste.

After they get the coffee to their headquarters, they carefully roast and cup each, fine-tuning the roast profiles until they perfectly highlight the beans. Onyx lists everything there is to know about their coffees on their website under each product. There you can find who they bought it from, how much they paid for it, what it scored at, and everything else, making their coffees entirely traceable.

Onyx Coffee Lab also ensures that everyone they work with is professionally trained to guarantee only expert care is used in every step of their coffee production. This takes place all the way to the staff in their cafes, where they provide excellent service to strengthen the communities that gather there.

Onyx Coffee Lab Subscription Review

In the subscription box that I received from Onyx Coffee Lab, there were two different products included. The Southern Weather coffee and Colombia Aponte Village coffee were beautifully packaged in Onyx’s signature brand design of stunning engraved boxes that hold simplistic bags of beans.

Southern Weather

The black box of coffee is Onyx Coffee Lab’s Southern Weather, which is considered their house blend. This is a washed processed coffee that comes from Colombia and Ethiopia, is grown at an altitude of 1,850 meters, and is considered to be a Moderate (medium) roast.

This is actually the very first blend that Onyx created and one of the ways that they take an extra step to ensure their coffees truly taste the best is by using a different method to create blends. They work backward by deciding what flavor profile they want and then proceed to cup different coffees to see which works to produce this profile.

Every few months, the coffees are switched in Southern Weather in order to keep it as a year-round blend while still using seasonal coffees. The creation of this coffee results in a brew that features tasting notes of milk chocolate, plum, candied walnuts, juicy, and citrus oil.

Onyx created this blend in search of a specialty coffee that was sweet, comfortable, and approachable. It’s their top-seller due to the consistent, delicious, and high-quality flavor profile of a round full body and a bright clean finish.

Upon my own brewing, I found that the aroma was a beautiful combination of chocolatey, nutty, fruity, and citrusy goodness. It was definitely one of the most delightful aromas I’ve come across and carried all the way through the brew.

The taste of this coffee had a warm, chocolatey, and nutty base with a complementing fruitiness. It’s well-balanced and delicious throughout, featuring a minimal acidity at the finish. Southern Weather just might be my favorite coffee yet!

Colombia Aponte Village

The other coffee that I received from Onyx was their Colombia Aponte Village, which is a unique single-origin offering that’s honey processed and raised-bed-dried. This Moderate (medium) roast is grown at an altitude of 2,100 meters and farmed by the Igna indigenous community.

Aponte Village is located in the mountains of Nariño and Onyx Coffee Lab worked hard to cup an array of single producer lots from the region, through which they only selected ones that cupped above an 86 on the SCA form.

In contrast to typical coffee processing in Colombia, this coffee was dried before it was washed. By doing this, the coffee becomes more intense in its profile of red fruits. Since it’s a delicate process, it’s easy to do it wrong and instead produce a bad vinegar-tasting cup.

The Colombia Aponte Village coffee is one of the many that’s got an intense honey sweetness and a fruity and floral undertone. It includes interesting tasting notes of cherry, floral honey, chocolate malt, and papaya.

Once I got to brewing this coffee on my French Press, I noticed that the aroma was a bright combination of sweet citrusy notes and a mellow chocolatey base. Its taste had a soft and sweet chocolate flavor to it with a delicate fruitiness to it that offers the slightest acidity at the end.

I also decided to try this as an iced pour-over and found that the flavors presented themselves even more through this brew, creating a sweet and refreshing sip. It’s another delicious and well-balanced cup that’s perfect for any morning!

Onyx Coffee Lab Subscription Options

Just like most of their website, Onyx Coffee Lab has an easy-to-navigate tab for subscriptions, which lets you pick whichever coffee you want. You can also pick their most popular subscription, the Roaster’s Choice.

This option allows you to taste a new fresh roast of a fresh crop of single-origin coffees straight from Onyx’s products that the roasters love the most. Since they release 35-45 single-origins every year, you’ll get something new on most of your deliveries. Sometimes they’ll even offer a single origin that’s only exclusive to this subscription!

Whether you choose the Roaster’s Choice subscription or subscribe to something that you already know you like, you can pick a delivery frequency of anywhere between every week to every four weeks. For each of these whole bean shipments, you can also choose how much is sent out of options of a 10-ounce bag, two 10-ounce bags, a 2-pound bag, or a 5-pound bag.

Onyx Coffee Lab: Roasting

As I mentioned earlier, Onyx Coffee Lab implements only the best care when it comes to their products, and this is most prominently seen in their roasting practices. Their roasting facility runs on solar energy from their rooftop and they roast and ship every weekday to ensure complete freshness.

Onyx roasts their coffees in a way that brings out their best attributes, so each goes through a bit different process. They then take a sample from each of their roasts and cup them so that they can ensure great quality and make sure that each meets the roast profile requirements. This extra step is one of the many things that make their coffee so delicious.

They include all of the information about each coffee, such as what they paid for it, its score, and who they bought it from, on their website. Complete traceability and openness make Onyx a company that can be trusted.

Onyx Coffee Lab: Pricing

When it comes to the pricing of Onyx Coffee Lab’s subscriptions, it really depends on which coffee you’re subscribing to. Luckily, by doing so you can save 5% compared to when you individually purchase the bags.

Since Onyx has a few different offerings, I’ll only discuss the prices of their Roaster’s Choice subscription as well as the two bags that I received. At the time of writing, the Roaster’s Choice subscription is priced at $23.94 for one 10-ounce bag.

When you subscribe to the Southern Weather coffee, it’s priced at $16.63 for a 10-ounce bag and a 10-ounce bag of the Colombia Aponte Village is $19.95. Plus, when you spend over $40 on your orders, you get free shipping!

What Makes Onyx Coffee Lab Unique?

It’s not hard to tell that Onyx Coffee Lab is definitely unique when compared to other coffee subscription services. From aesthetic branding and packaging to the most delicious coffee, Onyx prides itself on setting itself apart.

To start, Onyx has a gorgeous design on not only the bags/boxes themselves, but also on their website. When you select a coffee online, you get an easy-to-navigate page that’s not only beautiful but also informative. You’ll know everything you need to by simply scrolling along a product.

Plus, their coffee is exquisitely delicious! This can be seen just in the care that they put into each coffee and the roast profiles, but also in the taste of the brews themselves.

Onyx also makes sure to provide only the best customer service. They “love to be able to connect with Onyx coffee customers through [their] subscription program because it means that they’re choosing Onyx as part of their regular coffee routine & ritual.”

How To Cancel Onyx Coffee Lab

Onyx makes it super easy to make any changes to your subscription service. If you need to update the delivery frequency, skip a shipment, or change any shipping and billing information, all you have to do is log into your account on their website and go to “Manage Subscription.”

If you decide you want to cancel your subscription altogether (though I honestly can’t see why you would!), you can also do this through the same section on your account.

Onyx Coffee Lab: Final Thoughts

Overall, Onyx Coffee Lab has a great collection of unique and delicious coffees that are meticulously processed, roasted, and cupped before they’re sent out fresh to customers. With a subscription from Onyx, you’re truly getting a whole experience.

The coffees I was sent are truly some of my favorite coffees yet, which inspires me to try new things with them and even try out more of their selections. Luckily, Onyx offers a Roaster’s Choice subscription that lets people do just this!

Happy Caffeinating!