Best coffee advent calendars for a perfectly caffeinated Christmas countdown

Grind really lives up to its cool aesthetic persona with its advent calendar. Coming in its signature pale pink design, its book-like opening has a satisfying magnet fastening and black ribbon loop tab to open it, which feels a step above the rest in terms of its quality.

Its design speaks to its cool east London roots (its first cafe opened in Shoreditch) with a Victorian house illustration, drawn by artist Rozalina Brukova. It is peppered with millennial-looking characters with pink beanies carrying artisan bread and chic-feather pyjamas, paper Christmas hats, a festive tree in the window and Father Christmas climbing the house.

There are 13 flavours of coffee, including the Christmas blend, extra dark blend, house blend decaf, long blend and edition light blend. Each pod is Grind’s signature pink, compatible with Nespresso machines, compostable at home and doesn’t have a foil lid.

Our favourite is the classic slightly nutty house blend, and we took a festive fancy to the Christmas blend too, which is nicely spiced and reminds us of a Christmas pudding. We also liked that there were two pods on Christmas Day, so you can share a brew with someone else. The calendar is our favourite on the list, but it would have tipped the scale had it been possible to reuse such a pretty creation with the addition of drawers, instead of doors.

Best known for its up-market instant coffee that comes in brightly coloured little glass jars, Little’s has turned its hand to coffee pods for this advent calendar.

The brand is the brainchild of Finnish owners Henry and Leila Little who were inspired by American-style coffee and began creating their own signature big and bold flavours.

In the calendar, there are 24 doors hiding little recyclable coffee pods, which are all made with premium Honduran 100 per cent Arabica coffee. There’s a range of nine flavours, three of which are new limited edition festive options, including pumpkin spice, Irish cream and chocolate orange. The wider range includes creamy caramel, double chocolate, rich hazelnut, French vanilla, toffee nut and Christmas spirit, though some of them are quite sweet, so it’s best for people who like adding syrups to their coffees. We love the cool cartoony red and white design, which includes fun shapes like a gingerbread man, a Christmas tree, bells, coffee cups and stockings.

Without traditional doors to open each day, this compact calendar has red and green numbered cards, each with a sachet attached, numbered from one to 25. Each day contains a different packet of 18g of ground coffee, which Pact says is the perfect amount for a cup and we agree.

Pact prides itself on supporting smallholder farmers who are producing excellent coffees that aren’t often found elsewhere. On the back of each card, there is a wealth of information, including a few lines about the coffee, tasting notes, the grower’s name, its variety, roast, acidity, wash and mouthfeel – we loved learning these facts about our morning brew. There are also five stars for you to colour in to rate your coffee, so you can remember which was your favourite because Pact says many of these coffees will launch on its seasonal menu, so you’ll be able to get your paws on more of your top brew too.

They’re all rare and limited edition coffees with some festive flavours including Nkora from Rwanda, which has hints of ginger biscuits and one of our favourites, Finca Monterrey’s El Salvador coffee which has velvety notes of dark chocolate and spice. Inside the box, there’s a QR code for how to brew the coffee, depending on your kit, from a cafetière, V60, Aeropress and moka pot, or another code if you have a different method.

We love the traditional festive colours of the box, that it doesn’t take up too much space, and how it feels a really premium product.

Bringing to life an adult version of the material advent calendars with little pockets we had as children is this massive calendar from the Artisan Coffee Co.

Again, there are no doors, but 24 different coloured and randomly numbered sachets that slot into the four leaves of cardboard. Hang it from the golden ribbon at the top and find the correlating date to unwrap the day’s coffee to brew up. Each sachet details the coffee’s name, its character, type and intensity and gives a description and brewing instructions are on the back.

There are six different types of coffee, and our favourite is The Heroine, a smooth coffee with notes of chocolate and caramel. We love how simple the coffee bags are to use, making them one of the quickest and simplest brews to get our morning fix. We also really enjoyed the daily dose of little quips, quotes and trivia that’s printed behind each bag on the calendar.

With a festive bauble and cute wintery snow scene design, Yawn is up there with one of the best-looking calendars we tested. We highly rate this calendar for its versatility as you can choose not only your brew methods (beans, French press/cafetière, filter, espresso or drip bags) but you can also choose between the pro, ultimate and dark calendars. The dark is for those who love a dark roast, the pro (which we tested) gives a range of 22 single origin coffees and two blends, and the ultimate (currently sold out) which has the brand’s best scoring coffees. There’s also an add-on we recommend getting, which is an extra £5, but you get a large pouch of coffee and the details of the 24 different coffees, though we think it would be nice if this was included in the calendar.

We tested ground coffee and impressively, each of the 24 days had a different coffee to try, including from countries such as Peru, Kenya and El Salvador as well as the more unusual ones including Papua New Guinea. With each brew we made, we were really impressed with the aroma, depth and flavour profiles of each coffee which had us reaching for a new bag instead of thinking of popping into a café. There’s also a QR code to scan to get the lowdown on each day’s brew.

In a very Wonka-inspired move, there are golden tickets hidden in some of the calendars, and each day between 12 and 24 December, a winner will be selected at random and announced on Yawn’s Instagram stories, so be sure to follow along if you buy this one.

Reminiscent of the Battenberg cake colours, Rise’s pink and yellow doors have turned traditional festive colours on its head, which feels a welcomed tonic compared to the traditional reds, greens and metallics we so often see.

Behind each door is a speciality coffee from around the world inside, ranging from Colombia to Congo, and Ethiopia to Honduras and the coffee’s country of origin is labelled on both the door and the coffee packet.

What we really love is that Rise has gone the extra mile and included a QR code to scan each day to learn more about your coffee of the day, making it an easy and accessible way for coffee fans to learn more about their morning cup of joe. Each coffee we tried was intensely flavoured and helped kick-start our mornings.

Rise began life in 2020 as a subscription coffee business, sourcing coffees from around the world that are also ethically sourced. It’s part of the Friendly Coffee Fund, where 1% of all sales go to coffee-based community projects, including helping to get children into schools instead of working on coffee farms.

As the king of the coffee pod invention, this showstopper-looking calendar is one of two advent calendars available this year from Nespresso. We tested the vertuo machine-compatible calendar, while the navy blue one is for standard pods (£38, Nespresso.com).

We love the chic colourway of this calendar, which is a coral hue – another welcome change from the usual festive palette. The theme for this year’s calendar is travel, and the entire design has been inspired by the luxury Belmond train, harking back to a bygone era of train travel that’s depicted on the calendar with gold foil train carriages and windows. We also love that there are three new coffee flavours created jointly between Nespresso and Michelin-starred French chef Jean Imbert, known for his high-end Persian restaurant.

Spoiler alert (read on if you want to keep the surprise) – it’s also the only calendar to come with a big surprise behind the door on Christmas Eve: a limited edition porcelain mug which we think makes this calendar particularly worthy.