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Please refer to our status page here for regular and the latest status updates on delivery times. They are changing regularly at the moment and so it's impossible to give an estimation here.

Please also note that most couriers are currently experiencing severe delays to their normal services.

If your order is 2kg or less it will be sent using Royal Mail Tracked Services, if over 2kg via DPD courier service.

For information on typical delivery times and how to track with Royal Mail, please see here for 24 hour tracked and here for 48 hour tracked

If your order is 2 bags or less it is sent in letterbox friendly packaging and should be posted through your front door.

N.B. Not all letterboxes are created equal and we have found in some cases our box will not fit through small letterboxes or those with a cage on the inside of the door.

For all other deliveries, you will have been told or given the choice of either Royal Mail Tracked or DPD next day for delivery.

Royal Mail Tracked Services:
You can track your order with your delivery number here (you will have received an email or SMS with this).

If you're not going to be in you can provide details of a safe space or neighbour to leave your order with here. If you're not in when the postman attempts delivery and no safe space is given, they will leave a card with instructions on how to collect your parcel.

DPD Courier Services:
You can track your order with your delivery number here (you will have received an email or SMS with this).

If you're not going to be in you can provide details of a safe space, neighbour or change your delivery day using the DPD delivery app, which you can download here.

If you're not in when the courier attempts delivery and no safe space is given, they will leave a card with instructions on what happens next.

If there has been a delivery issue or your parcel has exceeded its collection period, Royal Mail will return the parcel to us as sender. Please contact us here with your order details, we’ll be happy to arrange for the parcel to be redelivered to you, once it arrives. This policy also applies to our DPD customers.

To avoid missing your parcel, we recommend checking your delivery address is correct before placing the order and once it’s despatched, checking the delivery status via the tracking number.

When we receive a returned parcel, we will always endeavour to contact the customer and offer redelivery. If we do not hear back within 2 weeks of contact, the coffee will be donated. 

If you're in the UK, standard delivery is £2 per order. 

If your order is over £15 or above 2kg in weight (that's 2 x 1kg bags or 10 x 200g bags) then delivery is free. 

If you're outside of Mainland UK then your order will be sent via a local courier and the delivery cost will be calculated on a weight basis. For full breakdown of delivery costs, see here.

We currently only offer delivery within Europe. We have found from previous experience that our coffee is often held up or rejected at international customs and means the freshness is lost. As it currently stands we aren't able to offer delivery outside of Europe because of the quality compromises it causes to our coffee and service.

Regrettably we are also unable to deliver to Norway for similar reasons.

If you would like to speak to us directly and arrange a special one off order to an international destination please contact us on our form here and we'll see what we can do.

Please bear in mind once your order is with the local courier at your country of destination we are unable to track and view the status of your order or provide you with delivery updates.

This isn't something we currently offer but it is a feature we're looking to provide in the near future. 

If you have any ideas, tips or suggestions for how this should work, please drop us a line here.

There are a few reasons why this might be... 

• You need to re-activate your email address on our new website (launched January 2019). You'll find a link to re-activate your account at the top of this page.
  
  
• Previously you have checked out as a "guest" in which case you will need to register for an account here
  
  
• You're a CoffeeClub customer. In which case you need to login here

If none of these fix the problem, we suggest you try resetting your password by clicking on the "forgot your password" link on this page. 

And if that still doesn't work, get in touch with us here and we'll be able to help

Follow the link you received in your order confirmation email and it will take you to your order page with the status of your order. 

Or you can login to your account (if you've created one) here and click on the order number in your order history list.

No problem. Click on "Forgot your password" link under the account login area. This will direct you to a form to submit your email address. We'll send you out an email to change your password, provided that email address is registered for an account. The email might not send immediately so please wait a couple of hours before contacting us (and don't forget to check your "junk" folder). 

If you're still having problems, contact us here.

Get in touch with us here and we will be happy to assist you.

Get in touch with us here and the team will be happy to assist you.

Once an order has been paid for and processed, we are unable to change it.

Yes, we offer a coffee subscription service called CoffeeClub. This service allows you to tailor a regular coffee delivery to your door. We send you two bags per delivery and the packaging conveniently fits through your letterbox. You'll never run out of coffee again. 

If you want to find out more, click here.

You don't need to sign in or create an account to order. Instead you can checkout as a ‘Guest’. 

Please bear in mind this will mean your order isn't stored on our website for future records.Creating an account allows you to do things like ‘Reorder’ again quickly, see all your invoices in one place and keep an address book of contact details.

Yes. Union Hand-Roasted Coffee is committed to protecting your privacy and promises not to share any information we collect with any third party. 

Our website uses https, a more secure protocol, meaning your data and most importantly your payment is encrypted and therefore better protected. Look for the padlock sign on your browser. We use Stripe Payments, Amazon and Apple Pay for our card payment handling, some of the largest and most trusted payment handling companies in the world.

If your order has not yet been despatched, absolutely (orders usually take 1 working day to leave the roastery). Drop us an email at here and we can add your heartfelt / witty / loving message.

If you would like to send a gift card with a future date of despatch, make sure you choose our digital gift card. Set your date and our system will send your recipient an email on the day of your choosing with details of their gift.

N.B If you're ordering a physical gift card, we don't offer a future date for sending. Orders placed before 4pm are prepared and despatched the next working day.

We can cancel or refund a digital gift card at any time (provided it has not been used). Please note your recipient will not be informed of the cancellation so you may wish to notify them their code will no longer work.

If you ordered a physical gift card and the order has not yet been desptched we can cancel your order. If it's delivered to you and provided you can give us the card number and it hasn't been used we may be able to help still. If however it has been sent to the recipient we are unable to cancel your card.

Get in touch with us here and we'll be able to help.

Not at all! You can use as much, or as little, of the gift card credit as you like and the remaining credit will remain in balance on your card.

Yes. The card acts as a discount on your order. Once the total value is exceeded you can pay the remaining balance via one of our other payment methods (card, paypal, etc.).

You can check the balance of your card here.

Please contact us here and we'll be able to help

Login to your account dashboard here. And you'll be able to make any changes you need.

Please note when making changes to your subscription e.g address changes, please take into account changes will take effect after the following order. 

You are able to ‘skip’ your next order or cancel the subscription and re-start it when you’re ready. 

Please note when making changes to your subscription account i.e skip your order.Changes will take into effect after the following order.

No, you can cancel your subscription at any time you like. Even after just one delivery. Although we hope you won’t. 

 If there is anything you are unhappy about do get in touch.

Get in touch with us via the form found here and we'd love to discuss further!

Get in touch with us via the form found here and we'd love to discuss further!

Our address is:

7a South Crescent
London
E16 4TL

You can find directions to the Roastery and get contact details on this page.

Our coffee bags are constructed from paper/aluminium/PET/PE to keep the coffee fresh. It is only recyclable in some boroughs/councils due to the mix of materials that need to be separated to be recycled. 

While we cannot compromise the freshness of the coffee, we are working on fully recyclable solutions. All our paper materials are FSC and recyclable (including the box around the retail packs, and all leaflets, corrugates and outer packaging).

Unfortunately our packaging has a plastic protective layer to keep the coffee fresh. All our paper materials are FSC and recyclable (including the box around the retail packs, and all leaflets, corrugates and outer packaging), but we don't have 100% plastic free coffee packaging unfortunately at the moment. 

This is something we are working on.

Hand-roasting represents our craftmanship required to create a perfectly roasted batch of coffee, with delicious aroma and flavour. This differs from industrial roasting systems, which are mostly automated, with little human intervention, built to maximise speed, efficiency and volume.

Our artisan roasting uses sensory skills to monitor changes in colour, aroma and the physical appearance of the coffee.  Our roastmasters are fully engaged throughout the time of the roast to make critical adjustments  depending upon the particular coffee. Our craft roasting creates an accurate roast profile (the rate of change of temperature during roasting) which is the key to consistency of each batch of coffee we roast. From our experience, skilled human intervention is essential for this. Hope this helps, and you can read more here

If you'd like to know more about our roasting, follow this link.

Our "flavour notes" are the tastes flavours in the brew that remind us of particular fruits or food items. 

Our team of coffee tasters are passionate about memorising all types of flavours they encounter daily and are trained to recognise them in coffee.

Blends are developed by our coffee team by mixing different Single Origin coffees to create a unique and delicious flavour profile that we want to make available either all year round, or for a particular season. 

For instance when we designed our House Roast we wanted a rich and balanced blend with deep flavours and a delicious underlying sweetness so we selected a full-bodied and chocolate-y coffee from Peru that we blended with a small proportion of sweet and fruity Colombia beans. 

Single Origin coffees come from a specific area or region, often a family-owned estate farm or a cooperative of smallholder famers who join forces and transport their crops to a central facility to create a bigger lot. This is an efficient way to facilitate export for smallholders and also maintain quality and flavour consistency from season to season. 

Microlots are coffee lots that have been selected and separated from the bulk of the crop because of a unique or distinctive characteristic(s). It could be for instance a higher quality score, a specific processing technique or simply a different flavour profile.

In our experience some coffees have natural characteristics that make them more suitable for one brewing method than another. We have tremendous respect and admiration for the hard work that coffee growers put into their craft, and avoid insisting on a specific brewing method for a particular coffee; we’d prefer to use the brewing technique that reveals the best expression of flavour. 

As a rule of thumb, espresso machines will make your cup more intense and acidic than filter brews so we tend to choose balanced coffees with a low acidity. On the other hand filter coffees can bring out clearer and more distinguishable flavours so we tend to place complexity and sweetness over perfect balance. These attributes are not set in stone for us but are helpful guidelines. There are indeed exceptions, and sometimes some coffees work very well for different brewing methods.

• Pick wholebean if you have a grinder or a bean to cup machine
  
• Cafetiere grind for a Cafetiere or French press
• Filter grind for any filter method including V60, Chemez, filter machine, aeropress and stovetop / moka pot or any pour over method
• Espresso grind for an espresso machine only
  

As a general rule the shorter the contact time between water and coffee, the finer the grind size: 

Espresso: ~25 seconds of contact time = very fine grind 
Cafetiere: ~4-minute brew = coarse grind 

Then if your coffee tastes too acidic and watery, making it finer will help- too bitter and gritty, coarser you should go.

For more information on grind sizes and types of grinders visit this page.

We use the CO2 process. This means only ingredients used in our decaffeination process are water and carbon dioxide.

Water steam is passed through the unroasted coffee beans to open their pores. Liquid CO2 is poured onto the beans and (Carbon Dioxide) is then pumped into an “evaporator” where it is turned back into a gas. This is where the caffeine is separated. It will then be re-pressurised into its liquid form and re-introduced into the coffee beans. This is a slow process that goes on until virtually all caffeine has been removed from the seeds- this can take up to four days!

If you'd like to understand more, we have a blog post you may like to read here.

We source our coffee through Union Direct Trade, this is our sustainability initiative which is defined by our Union Code of Conduct. The Code sets clear environmental expectations. We expect all farms we source from to apply sustainable production systems, for example, shade grown coffee which promotes biodiversity, composting, terracing to manage soil erosion, and pest control though integrated pest management using biological control systems. These methods reduce or eliminate chemical applications, for example, synthetic fertilizer or pesticides.  High-altitude grown coffee that we source are not exposed to pests in the way lower-altitude, commodity-grade coffees are. At warmer temperatures, pests are more active which require more intense intervention with pesticide chemicals. We routinely screen our coffees for pesticide residue, at a specialist laboratory, and this is always undetectable.  

Organic coffee is grown without synthetic inputs such as chemical pesticides or synthetic fertilizer. In places like Ethiopia and Indonesia, farmers do not use these synthetic inputs, either because they are not available, or to reduce costs. These farmers use organic production systems but may not be certified to avoid the extra administration and high costs associated with this. Organic certification guarantees that the production process has been audited by an independent organisation and achieves compliance. Furthermore, at our roastery, we are inspected annually by the Soil Association to ensure we maintain the organic status during roasting and packaging. 

Q (Quality) scores are the internationally-recognised way of representing coffee quality: the better the coffee the higher the score. 

Professional coffee tasters train with the Coffee Quality Institute before taking a full week of exams at the end of which, if they pass all of them, will earn a certification that sanctions their ability to taste and evaluate coffee. 

At Union, every person who has the responsibility of assessing and selecting coffee has successfully been through the Coffee Quality Institute course.

Coffee freshness is important because coffee loses its qualities over time at the contact of oxygen and humidity, which is why we recommend you to store your coffee in a tight and sealed container once it is open. 

Because of the minuscule particle size pre-ground coffee is much more exposed to this staling process and will start losing its quality and taste within a few days. We flush the bags with nitrogen to force the oxygen out and prevent oxidation- however once the bag seal is opened, the coffee will be exposed to air again and should be used quickly! 

On the other hand coffee can also be too fresh. It may sound odd that a coffee can be too fresh, but the roasting process creates carbon dioxide inside the beans which takes several days to slowly escape. This carbon dioxide creates microscopic gas pockets which prevents the brewing water from fully extracting the flavours and this effect is magnified by the high pressure espresso machines apply to the coffee. 

We recommend for Wholebean...

Ideally no more than two weeks and certainly no longer than a month, and dependent on your brew method:
For Espresso: From ten days to a month (max)
For Filter: from four days to three weeks 

 We recommend for Pre-ground...

As soon as possible once open, no longer than two weeks.

For more tips on storage and getting the best out of your beans, visit this page.

There are several opinions in the coffee industry around storing coffee at home. As a reminder, here is our view on the matter: 

Fresh air is coffee's greatest enemy. Oxygen and moisture within the air are quickly absorbed by the roasted beans, at the expense of their inherently delicious flavours. 

When a bag is opened, in general, wholebean coffee begins to lose its flavour when left out after one week, while ground coffee can do so within an hour of opening. If you are using wholebean coffees, store them in their bags at room temperature, out of direct sunlight. 

Never store your coffee in the fridge – not even in an air-tight container. Fresh roasted coffee is incredibly hygroscopic, and will quickly absorb odours in the air. A fridge normally contains strong aromas, which will then be transferred to your cup. 

The best way to store coffee is in the freezer. This is because the inert environment will help to lock in the fine flavours over a much longer period of time. This method of storage is especially recommended if you are a low volume user of fresh, ground coffee. 

When taking coffee out for brewing after freezing it, always ensure that you take out only as little as is needed, and return the rest of the pack back to the freezer, immediately. This is because if kept out for long periods of time, condensation will form on the grounds, and thus destroy the flavours – particularly if this water is then re-frozen. Coffee does not like frequent extreme changes of temperature. 

Having said all that – best way is to drink your coffee quick while it’s fresh!