Get down with Angels' Cup
You'll love us as much as our subscribers
We take a lot of pride in what we’re building here at Angels' Cup. Subscribers to our coffee tasting flights and the people who use our app are the top 0.1% of coffee drinkers. But the roasters we feature are also in the top 0.1%. Even though we’re buying coffee from you, we view you as just a different type of customer. Here are the top four reasons why Angels’ Cup is the best subscription service to work with.
1. We don’t waste your time with exclusivity contracts. We view ourselves as partners in your business, and we want to help you grow. How can we be partners while contractually limiting your distribution? We want you to sell as many beans as possible, at the highest prices possible.
2. Our shop and app direct customers to your website. The world doesn’t need another middleman, and we didn’t set out to be one. After we ship your coffee, we list it for sale in our shop, but we don't actually process those transactions, we link customers to your website and let you get the sale. Our shop exists only to connect our subscribers with the coffee they love.
3. Amazing feedback from real customers. When subscribers record tasting notes on your coffee, you get the feedback. No other subscription service can offer this. It’s a great way to find out what people like and why, and it’s a great way to make sure you’re buying the best coffee beans.
4. We help you reach a larger audience. Our Cupping Flight is 1oz samples, meaning a 5lb bag gets split up and sent to 80 different coffee drinkers. And because we’ve met so many customers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit, there’s a good chance that if they love your coffee, they’ll talk about it. We also include links to your social media accounts on the summary page in our app. As soon as a subscriber has recorded tasting notes on your coffee, they're directed to all the places they can connect with you. If you want to increase the reach of your brand, there's no better way than with Angels' Cup.
Ready to be featured in a tasting flight?
We know it’s expensive to send samples to subscription services, and nothing breaks our heart more than telling good roasters we can’t ship their coffees. To help avoid that, here’s what we’re looking for:
- Light roasts, maybe medium, definitely not dark.
- 100% arabica, no flavored coffee.
- Strong preference for single origins. We don't ship blends to light roast subscribers, and single-origins have an edge in our medium roast subscription.
- Natural or honey processed coffees have a much higher chance of being selected.
- Unusual origins (think Yemen) have a higher chance of being selected.
- We ship an Ethiopian in almost every flight, but it’s a competitive category.
- Higher acidity, complex, and sweet coffees have a higher chance of being selected.
- The single most important thing we look for is distinctly identifiable flavor and aroma characteristics. Our customers use a tasting app to identify the flavors in coffee, and we want them to be able to get similar answers to the roaster, and to each other.
Roaster FAQ
Q: How many samples should I send?
You should send at least 4 samples. We feature two coffees from each roaster. If you send 1 coffee and we totally love it, we won’t ship it until you send us another. If you send 2, we have to love both, a very rare occurrence. The more you send the better, but please ship us at least four at a time.
Q: How large should the samples be?
As small as possible. An ounce or two is fine. 4oz bags are fine. We appreciate 12oz bags, but honestly we end up giving it to friends, family, the mailman, and the garbage can. Please, save money on coffee and shipping, don’t send us full bags unless you have to.
Q: Who packs the coffees into sample bags?
We buy 5lb bags and repack into our sample bags.
Q: What if someone wants to buy a full bag?
We try and help you drive sell-through of whole bags in two ways. 1) At the end of a tasting, app users will see a link that says something like “buy 12oz for $17”. You're responsible for setting that up when you upload Roastmaster Notes, but that link goes directly to your store page and we don’t take a cut of that transaction.
We also have a shop page where we post pictures of your packaging and a little info about you. However, our shop doesn’t actually process transactions, it also links directly to your store page. We’re a coffee tasting company, not a middleman. However, we're sometimes slow adding coffees to that section of the site.
Q: How often will you feature a roaster?
We won’t ship the same coffee twice in a year, but we do try to feature the same roasters as often as we can. It depends more on how many different coffees you roast and how often you cycle through different origins. The more we try, the more we like, the more we ship.
Q: Is there anything else you need?
Once we buy coffee from you, we need you to upload roaster notes, and to send us an empty bag of your normal 12oz packaging. We will use that bag for photos on our instagram, twitter, pinterest, facebook, and shop page. We work hard to promote you on social media when your coffee ships. We super appreciate it when roasters promote us back.
Ready to upload roastmaster notes?
As a roaster, when you upload notes, they become available for our app users to compare answers with. It’s a really cool way to communicate with our customers and educate them about what makes your coffee special.
If you don't already have an account, contact us to set one up for you (It's separate from the regular user login. It's all free and uploading notes is very similar to SCAA Cupping Protocol, so it won't take long to learn. Once your up and running, uploading notes takes about three minutes and you have access to a dashboard where you can add or edit your tasting notes.
If you already have an account click the button below to log in. If not, contact us using the form below and we’ll get you set up right away.
Black Box & Cupping Flight Shipping Checklist
Ready to ship coffee to us? Here's a quick checklist of things we need:
- We strongly prefer coffee to be shipped to us via USPS Priority because UPS and FedEx don't move on Sunday. If you need help, we can produce a label for you to use.
- Please pack each box with an equal amount of coffee. This way if one box in the shipment gets lost, we can still pack whatever arrived on time.
- Please include an empty retail bag of each coffee for us to take pictures of.
- If your 5 pound bags are craft paper, please tie each one in a grocery bag. The craft paper bags frequently burst during shipping and spill inside the box.
All Stars Shipping Checklist
If your coffee is selected for All Stars, that means our community thought it was extraordinary. So first of all, congrats! All Stars works very different than our tasting flight subscription though, here's what you need to know.
- We pay for and produce the shipping labels. This ensures our subscribers can get shipping confirms and tracking numbers right away. We will send you a PDF with all the labels in it.
- We ship via USPS Priority Flat Rate. Please let us know if you already have these envelopes available. If so, we need to know which size and type to produce the correct shipping labels. If not, we will have some bubble mailers delivered to you. They're free.
- We will incude a PDF letter for you to print out and include with each shipment (so our subscribers know it came from us). A few individuals might have a special letter if it's the first or last delivery in a gift subscription.