Christmas Gift Ideas For Coffee Lovers

By: Kev | Updated On: May 17, 2024 at 2:05 pm

Yes, I’m definitely biased, as I’m clearly nuts about coffee, but in my opinion, coffee related gifts are among the best gift ideas for just about all occasions, as long as the person you’re buying for is a coffee lover, of course.

What makes coffee gifts such a great idea, whether you’re shopping for Christmas gift ideas, Birthday gifts, Father’s Day or Mother’s Day gifts, is there’s such a huge range of options covering all possibly price points.

If you’re looking for Secret Santa gifts for a coffee lover for example, there are plenty of options from £10-£20 which tend to be the normal for Secret Santa these days.

If you’re looking for something a bit more special, up to £50, there are lots of options including coffee gift boxes, coffee brewers & coffee brewing kits.

If you’re looking for a slightly bigger gift for the someone very special, again there’s loads of choice up to and well beyond the £100 mark, including brewers, coffee machines, and home barista training courses.

So this is the way I’m going to split this up, by price point. Coffee gifts for each price point, giving that most of us when looking for gifts have a budget in mind.

I’m focusing on Christmas related gifts in my wording of this post simply because this is the way the internet works, Christmas gifts represents the biggest search traffic where gift ideas are concerned, but all of these coffee lovers gifts suggestions will work for gifts for all occasions.

So this post is being split into the following price points, you can simply click the link below to go to the price point you’re shopping within:

Regardless of the price point, though, what makes coffee related gifts such a good idea for any friend or family members who you know to be coffee lovers, is the thought that went into the purchase.

The least (genuine at least) smile provoking gifts are the most generic, !Ooh, more socks, they’ll come in handy, thanks”, or “Ooh, one of those gift cards you can apparently spend just anywhere, until you go to use them and you find out you can actually spend them just about nowhere… I’ll re-gift that, just like you probably did ;-)”, you get the idea.

Gifts like that are tokens, but tokens of what? They don’t show the recipient that you put any thought into it, or that you know what they’re into.

When you know someone is really into their coffee, and you buy them a coffee related gift, it shows some thought has gone into the purchase, you’ve actually thought about them, and you actually know a bit about them, so it may still only be a token, but it’s a token that says “I know you, I know what you like, and I think enough of you to have put at least a bit of thought into buying this for you!”.

So, let’s get started with:

Best Christmas Gift Ideas Under £20

Contigo Byron Snapseal Travel Mug

Contigo make some of the best-selling travel mugs in the UK, and they sell so well for good reasons, they’re very good, they work very well, and they’re really reasonable! This one at present is just over a tenner, which is a bargain for a well insulated stainless steel travel mug, especially one that has a solid seal and is spill proof and leak proof.

It’ll take about 470ml of coffee, or whatever beverage the recipient chooses to fill it with, that’s 16.5 fluid ounces, just under half a litre so decent capacity, but it’s not too chunky, it’ll fit into most car cup holders.

For me, travel mugs are a great little inexpensive gift idea, which are always going to end up being used.

Can you think of any coffee lover who wouldn’t find use for a travel mug like this, in fact anyone regardless of whether they have a thing for coffee or not, is going to find a travel mug useful. Even if it’s a gift for one of those bizarre people who don’t like hot drinks ;-), it’ll keep cold drinks cold too. Don’t put hot drinks and cold drinks in this travel cup at the same time, though, only David Beckham can do that (very old joke!).

Brifit Digital Coffee Scale

If you have any coffee loving friends or family that you’re looking for a relatively inexpensive coffee related gift for, a set of brew scales is a great idea!

This is particularly true if you know that your coffee loving friend or relative brews their coffee fresh, either with an espresso machine, filter coffee machine or manual brew method including pourover filter, aeropress or cafetiere.

They might not even know that they need a set of scales, many people who get into freshly brewing coffee fight the temptation to buy brew scales for a while, seeing them as almost the gateway into full coffee geekery, scales one minute, and the next thing you now they’re using all manner of scientific instruments to fastidiously brew their coffee.

But eventually, most people come to realise that you can’t get repeatable results without scales, you need to know how much ground coffee you’re using, and you need to know how much coffee you’re brewing.

You can pay just about as much or as little as you like for brew scales, and of course you get what you pay for, but these are pretty good for the very low cost.

They’re USB-C rechargeable, they’re fairly small, so if the person you’re buying for has an espresso machine, this isn’t going to take up too much height on the drip tray, and although it’s doubtful that scales at this price are going to be ultra precise to the fraction of a gram, this really isn’t all that important for brew scales.

The main reason I, personally, would invest a bit more money in brew scales, is for refresh rate, and therefore lack of latency. What this means is that with cheaper, slower scales, you have to wait a second or two for the weight to update, while with very expensive scales such as the Acaia Lunar for example, there’s virtually no delay, so you see the weight in real-time.

But for a set of brew scales for under £20 that are rechargeable and compact, and will be plenty precise enough, I think these are a great little sub £20 gift idea for coffee lovers, and of course they can be used for weighing food too (anything up to 3Kg).

They have a timer, which combined with being compact is what would qualify these as being “brew scales”, as these are the important features. They’ll also weigh in grams, ounces and ml, although I have to say the ml feature is slightly odd, as surely this will be the same as grams?

Aieve WDT Tool

If the coffee lover you’re buying a gift for has recently purchased an espresso machine, then although this contraption may look very strange to you, they’ll know exactly what this is!

WDT stands for the Weiss Distribution Technique, named after the fella who developed it, and it’s often referred to as the “WDT Method”, which means Weiss distribution technique method, always makes me giggle ;-).

It started off as just one needle to stir and distribute coffee grounds with, then people developed it into multiple needles, often buy sticking them into a cork, and of course there are lots of different WDT tools on the market now, and this is one of the current best sellers on Amazon.

Even if you’re not sure if the recipient already has one of these, I wouldn’t worry too much, us coffee geeks tend to hoard gadgets ;-), and they don’t last forever, either. In theory you can replace the needles if they bend or break, but having a spare one wouldn’t be a bad thing, I have several, but I have a great excuse to hoard coffee gadgets, given that it’s my job.

World Atlas of Coffee – James Hoffmann

If you’re also a coffee lover, then James Hoffmann will need no introduction to you, if you’re not, then you can bet that your coffee loving loved one will know who he is, in fact they’ll more than likely subscribe to his YouTube channel along with millions of others!

James Hoffmann is without a doubt one of the most experienced and knowledgeable people on the planet where coffee is concerned, and any one who wasn’t sure of this will be by the time they’ve got a few pages into his book.

I bought this years ago, and it’s an absolute treasure trove of coffee related info. I don’t need to spend much time harping on about it, honestly if you’re buying a gift for a coffee lover, and you’re wanting to spend under £20 and you’re not sure what to get them, get the hardcover version of the Atlas of Coffee. If I got this as a Secret Santa gift, by the way, I would definitely rate that as the best Secret Santa gift I’ve ever been given, even though I already have it ;-).

Best Christmas Gift Ideas Under £50

Degono Cafetiere With GroundsAway ™

For me, this is one of the very best gift ideas for coffee lovers, especially for any coffee lovers who enjoy cafetiere coffee.

Many of us have parents and other relatives who won’t move away from their trusty cafetiere towards more modern seemingly new fangled and complex brewing methods, and that’s absolutely fine of course, there’s a good reason the Cafetiere has done so well, it’s one of the most simple brewing methods.

Just chuck ground coffee in, pour hot water in, leave it for a bit and then plunge, easy.

But if you’re buying a gift for someone who has an old worn out cafetiere, the Degono would be a mega gift idea. It’s a cafetiere, but it’s also not a cafetiere ;-).

Although cafetieres are very easy to use, they have a couple of downsides, namely bits of coffee in your cup, and they’re a bit of a chore to clean. Also, if you’re brewing coffee and leaving it in the pot, it has a tendency to end up being overly bitter, as it’ll continue extracting until it cools down enough, as the grounds are still in contact with the coffee.

The husband and wife inventors behind the Degono, have created a cafetiere which deals with all of these cons of the normal cafetiere.

It uses a two filter system that sandwiches the ground coffee together, so when you plunge, the grounds are caught between the two filters, you then just lift them out and dump them into wherever you dump your coffee grounds. It also means that you can do this as soon as your coffee is brewed, which means you then have a pot of coffee which is no longer continuing to extract.

The filter mesh is finer than with most traditional cafetieres, too, so you end up with a slightly cleaner cup, a bit less muddy.

Better still, this is one of the few coffee related products I’ve come across that is actually made in the UK, and it’s sold directly from the Degono website, a small company that give good, old fashioned customer service

The Coffeeworks Beginner Home Barista Collection Box

I may be biased (as this is my own coffee…) but I think our beginner home barista collection box is a brilliant idea as a gift idea for coffee lovers, particularly if the person you’re buying a gift for has recently started using an espresso machine.

One of the difficulties of getting started with an espresso machine is that there are many great coffee beans out there that take a bit more skill when it comes to getting decent results from, so some people make things fairly difficult for themselves without realising it, by starting out with beans that aren’t as forgiving.

The coffee beans in the beginner home barista collection box are all blends that are quite easy to dial in, in particular chocolate brownie blend and chocolate fondant blend, fruit cake blend is just a tiny bit more challenging (not much) and fruit and nut blend being a slightly lighter roast profile and a blend of two single origin arabicas, is the one bag of beans in the box that will just require a little bit more thought to dial in.

So what this means is that this collection is a great way to start to learn to dial in, starting with easier blend and then working your way towards the fruit and nut blend.

Dialling in means to tweak things to get the best extraction, for the best tasting espresso, in case you were wondering what the heck I’m going on about as you may be if you’re not really into coffee but you found your way here purely when doing some research to figure out what might be a good gift idea for your coffee lover friend or relative.

If you like the idea of a collection box but the person you’re buying for doesn’t have an espresso machine, see:

V60 Starter Starter Kit With Hario Mini Mill

V60, for anyone not familiar with it, is a pourover filter brewer from Japanese firm Hario, it’s one of the most popular brewers, and it differs from most in its V shape, and the fact that it’s a single hole brewer.

There’s a bit more skill involved with the V60 than some of the flat bottomed brewers, so it’s one for the more for the enthusiast rather than the utilitarian, but it’s capable of producing some very nice tasting filter coffee with a bit of practise.

This is a kit that includes the one cup V60, the Hario Mini Mill hand grinder, and 100 filters.

So your coffee loving loved one is not only going to be able to freshly brew their own coffee with this kit, but to grind it themselves too – and for the current deal price, it’s quite a bit under £50, in fact it currently costs less than the grinder usually sells for on its own, so I think it’s a great deal.

Bialetti Moka Pot

Even if you’re not a coffee nerd, you’ll probably have heard of the Bialetti, or be familiar with the logo? Bialetti was the original brand of Moka pot, so they’re often referred to as Bialetti’s regardless of whether they’re genuine Bialetti stovetops or not, a bit like with people referring to vacuum cleaners as Hoovers.

Moka pots are a great way to brew a strong, concentrated espresso style coffee. They’ll work on stoves, of course, and also on camping stoves or camp fires, so they’re good for camping too. They’re a fairly simple non-fuss approach to brewing something very similar to espresso, which is why they’re so popular in Italy and other parts of Europe where espresso is a part of daily life.

I say “espresso style”, because some people will get annoyed with me if I say that a Moka pot (or anything other than an espresso machine) will produce true espresso. It’s strong, concentrated coffee, it doesn’t have the crema that espresso does, but it’s one of the best ways to make an espresso type coffee either to drink on its own or to mix with milk for a cappuccino or latte type coffee, or to dilute with hot water.

This is the 6 cup version, but if you click the links above you’ll see the option to view the various different sizes from the one cup version all the way up to the 9 cup.

Fellow Atmos Vacuum Coffee Storage

While a coffee storage canister doesn’t seem like a particularly exciting gift, to the coffee love, it really is – and if not, it should be. What I mean by this, is that where you store your coffee beans really matters, and not all coffee lovers are aware of the importance of bean storage.

Coffee goes stale for a few main reasons, the main one being oxidation, which is of course due to being in contact with oxygen. The other thing coffee beans don’t like are heat and moisture, or changes in humidity.

There are loads of coffee storage canisters on the market, but the issue with most of them is they trap the air in with the beans. The fellow Atmos is one of the few storage devices that allows you to flush out the air to create vacuum storage.

They do them in black stainless steel and glass, personally I prefer the stainless steel ones, as they keep the beans out of light too, and of course stainless steel is less likely to smash if you have a moment of clumsiness.

The only thing I’m not a huge fan of with the Atmos is that they won’t store a great deal, the small one will store around 140g of beans, the medium will store up to about 300g, and the big one holds around 380-450g, so they’re not really for storing big quantities of beans. Having said that, a good approach to coffee storage is to split them into a couple of storage devices, and use one at a time.

Aeropress Go

The Aeropress Go is one of the newer versions of the Aeropress, made specifically as a travel brewer.

I wasn’t sure about it at first, because I’m not sure what about the original Aeropress isn’t a travel brewer, it’s not exactly big or heavy. When I got hold of one, I understood straight away, it’s a completely self contained unit with all of the bits and bobs including the filters and the stirrer, and the case doubles as a cup, too.

When you remove the lid, you have everything you need other than hot water, all within one package. That’s if you want to drink out of the container which doubles as a cup, I think it’s fine as a last resort if you don’t have a nicer cup to drink out of, but it wouldn’t be my vessel of choice, I’m not a big fan of drinking out of plastic.

If the person you’re buying a gift for does some travelling, this would be a great little gift idea, and you’ll get about a tenner change from your £50, too.

Best Christmas Gift Ideas Under £100

L'OR Barista Capsule Machine

The Nespresso original line compatible machines have quite a few things going for them, they’re available in very cheap packages, like this one from Philips which is available at the time of writing for not much more than fifty quid (usually £110, currently available at half price) and there’s a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to the pods available.

For a long time, the only pods you could use with Nespresso machines were Nespresso pods. When companies started to test Nespresso’s resolve to police their patents, many of them didn’t push too hard, but a few including the very small (by comparison) company Dualit, were willing to go all the way to court.

Dualit won the David and Goliath level legal battle, and in doing so paved the way for more compatible pods and compatible machines.

As a result, in terms of the original line Nespresso machines, they’ve really become a different brewing method in their own right, and they’ve become incredibly versatile thanks to the versatility of pods available.

So if the coffee lover you’re buying a gift for just wants the cheapest short concentrated coffees they can get, there are masses of options for them. If they want to scour the market to try various pods from various suppliers to find the pods that offer them the right balance of cost vs taste, and that meet their other requirements such as being compostable as many compatible Nespresso pods are these days, they can do that.

If, on the other hand, they’re focused purely on taste, and they want to use a pod machine to try lots of different coffee from small batch roasters, they can do that too, as there are a large and increasing number of speciality coffee roasters now doing this.

Most of them are using recyclable or compostable pods too, so pods don’t have to have the same kind of impact on the environment that they have in the past.

A good example of this, is Grind London.

They offer a range of different compostable coffee pods, roasted in London, and they’re very similarly priced to Nespresso pods.

But there are loads, and loads of options in terms of other UK roasters now offering their coffee in pods. Initially the pricing was a bit silly, with some roasters charging close to £2 per pod, but a lot of this was to do with the costs involved in producing pods in the UK, as it usually involved having to send your coffee to one of the very few factories in Europe who offer to do this.

These days this is becoming more accessible as there are more options, the prices are coming down slightly, and there are a very small number of UK roasters who’ve brought pod manufacture in house, and I think this will increase in the relatively near future.

In terms of the details of this specific pod machine, to all intents and purposes, a pod machine is a pod machine, this isn’t actually quite true, but if you’re spending under £100, it kind of is. If you’re spending hundreds, there are various different options that may produce a difference in cup quality, including the Sage Creatista range, and the Morning machine, but if you’re spending £50-£100, you’re going to get roughly the same kind of machine.

Personally, I think the Philips L’or machines are among the best options for this kind of money. If I was buying a pod machine for someone on a budget of under £100, it would probably be this one, and, if your budget is £100, you could buy them a load of pods too while this machine is available for about £55! :-).

Melitta Look IV Therm Timer

If your coffee loving friend or relative drinks filter coffee, and you think they’d benefit from waking up to a nice big 1.3 litre jug of filter coffee, this is a great option, for currently just over the £50 mark.

Melitta are a well known German brand, so this isn’t one of the many generic filter coffee machines you’ll see at too good to be true prices, they’re really well made for the money, they have a stainless steel insulated carafe meaning it’ll keep the coffee hot rather than having to leave a glass carafe on a hot plate which leads to overly bitter tasting coffee, and they have a simple to use timer function.

I actually think a lot of coffee lovers would benefit from having a filter machine like this. Even the seasoned home barista will have circumstances in which they just need a big jug of coffee, and they don’t have the time or ability in that particular situation to do their usual barista routine.

A home barista looking for a filter coffee machine I think would probably gravitate towards something like the Sage Precision Brewer, and I would, that’s an incredible brewer, but it’s not under £100.

But for the price, I think you’ll struggle to get a better filter coffee machine than this, and I think a lot of people would be very happy to receive this as a gift.

Wilfa Svart Coffee Grinder

If you’re buying a gift for a coffee lover who doesn’t currently grind their own coffee, you’re going to be doing them a huge amount of good by getting them a grinder, and the Wilfa Svart is one heck of a grinder for just under £100.

If the recipient doesn’t yet own a coffee grinder, it could be that they realise they need one but they’ve just not been able to justify the spend, in many cases I think it’s simply that people don’t understand how important it is to grind your own coffee.

Yes, switching from instant coffee or pods to freshly brewed coffee is a step up towards enjoying better quality coffee, and switching from “mainstream” commodity beans to freshly roasted beans is a huge jump in the right direction (see this post I’ve recently written which explores this further), but you’re never going to get the full experience and the full taste, until you’re grinding fresh.

If the person you’re going to be giving this gift too is brewing by any method other than with an espresso machine, the Wilfa Svart is among the best options for this price point. They’re well built, easy to use, they do a decent job for manual brew methods, especially for a grinder at this price, and they come with a 5 year warranty.

If they do have an espresso machine, this will work for them if it’s something like a Delonghi Dedica, Swan Retro or other low cost espresso machine with pressurised baskets, but if they’re using a more premium machine with standard baskets, they’ll need an espresso capable grinder, see the Gaggia MD15 below.

Gaggia MD15 Coffee Grinder

Putting two different coffee grinders in the best coffee gifts under £100 probably seems a bit much, but I wanted to include the MD15 as well as the Svart, for anyone who is buying for someone who they know has an espresso machine that they want to use with standard, traditional espresso baskets.

I’d imagine that a lot of people thinking of spending close to a hundred quid on a gift for a coffee lover, is probably buying a gift for someone very close, so I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to imagine that the person buying the gift will know, or will be able to find out.

Espresso capable grinders don’t usually come in at under £100, in fact most of them are £300-£400 and beyond, and the Gaggia MD15 isn’t the perfect espresso grinder by any stretch, but it’s about the cheapest grinder on the market that can grind fine enough for espresso with standard baskets.

It’s a bit more flashy looking than the Wilfa Svart, it has five pre-set doses, it has flashy lights which of course make a huge difference to coffee quality ;-), and although I would go for the Wilfa Svart for a sub £100 grinder for manual brew methods, for espresso I’d go with the Gaggia MD15, as there isn’t really another grinder on the market sub £100 that will do the job.

Home Barista Training Course

My final recommendation for best gifts for coffee lovers under £100, would be a home barista training course. I think these are a brilliant gift idea, they’re hugely valuable, in my opinion, and they’re available for under £100, which I think is great value for money.

I actually get a lot of emails from readers asking me if I do home barista training courses myself, I don’t, for very good reasons.

Anyone who has ever tried to deliver any kind of training will know that you don’t just have to know how to do the thing you’re teaching, you have to know how to teach it, too. There’s a reason that teachers have to put so much time and effort into learning how to teach, and also when it comes to barista training, there’s a good reason that the people who do this have to train to be able to do it.

Since training is something you have to do in person, you’ll need to find a course that your coffee loving gift recipient can get to, so here are some options:

200 Degrees Barista Schools. Home Barista Training available in Nottingham, Leeds, Lincoln, Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester & Chester, for £79 for a three hour course.
Winchester Coffee School. Run by Winchester Coffee Roasters, their coffee school offers a 2 hour home barista training from just £60
North Star Coffee. Home barista training course in Leeds for £75 for a three hour training session.
UE Coffee Roasters. Home barista training in Witney, for £65 for a 2 hour training course.
Arden Coffee. Based in Buxton, Derbyshire, these guys offer 2 hour beginner barista courses from £69 per person for a two hour training session.

Coffee Gift Ideas Over £100?

I think the vast majority of people shopping for coffee related gifts are going to be spending under £100, and if you are shopping at a much higher budget than this, there are more detailed posts I can point you to depending on what you’re heading towards.

What I mean by this is that if you’re considering spending over a hundred quid, it’ll probably be for a specific reason, for example because you’re thinking of buying your significant other or close family member a coffee machine, and if that’s the case there are various very detailed posts I’ve already published that would be better resources for you than this post about the best gift ideas for coffee lovers.

Here’s some of the best resources for anyone thinking of making a more significant investment as a gift for a coffee lover:

Life is like a box of chocolates, subscribe to my YouTube Channel, try my coffee at The Coffeeworks (use discount code CWNC25 for 25% off your first order), follow me on Twitter & Instagram, follow the coffeeblog FaceBook page, and that’s all I have to say about that.