Starbucks At Home Coffee Menu USA

Every store has a wall of bagged coffee and a shelf of VIA packets, and it is the part of the menu with no nutrition panel at all, because beans are beans. The at-home category holds 22 items in eight sections: whole-bean bags in Blonde Roast, Medium Roast and Dark Roast, the VIA instant packets in the same three roasts plus Iced Coffee, and the Shopping Bag to carry it all out.

Only three bags carry a pickup price at Starbucks (Northgate Way & I-5), Seattle: the Pike Place Roast and Decaf Pike Place Roast at $3.75 a pound and the Starbucks Blonde Espresso Roast at $3.75. The rest are sold in store at prices the app shows per location.

Starbucks roasts darker than most American brands, so its blonde is another roaster's medium and its medium is another's dark. The three shelves are best read as light, middle and heavy within the Starbucks range.

• Drip machine: Pike Place Roast is the default and what the store brews; Veranda Blend for lighter, Caffè Verona for heavier.
• Espresso machine: Espresso Roast for the Signature shot, Starbucks Blonde Espresso Roast for the Blonde. Both are the exact coffees used in store.
• French press: Sumatra or Komodo Dragon Blend; body is the point of a press and the dark Indonesians have the most.
• Pour over: Starbucks Green Apron Blend or Guatemala Antigua, the two bags with the most origin character.
• Cold brew: Starbucks Sunsera Blend for a bright, tea-like cold brew, Caffè Verona for a chocolatey one.
• Moka pot: Starbucks Blonde Espresso Roast; blondes take the moka's heat better than dark roasts.
• No brewer at all: the VIA packets, any roast, hot water or cold.

VIA is microground coffee blended with a soluble extract, which is why it tastes closer to brewed than freeze-dried instant does and dissolves in cold water as well as hot. Four VIAs are on the shelf: Starbucks VIA Instant Veranda Blend for blonde, Starbucks VIA Instant Pike Place Roast for medium, Starbucks VIA Instant Italian Roast and its decaf for dark, and the Starbucks VIA Instant Sweetened Iced Coffee that is made for cold water and comes with the sugar in the packet.

One packet makes an 8 oz cup, two make a mug or a 16 oz iced glass. The Italian Roast packet is the one that stands up to milk; the Veranda is the one to drink black. None of them carry a published caffeine figure in the reference data, so none is stated here.

Three decafs: Decaf Pike Place Roast on the medium shelf, Decaf Sumatra on the dark shelf, and the Starbucks VIA Instant Decaf Italian Roast packet. All are decaffeinated before roasting, and the Pike Place is the mildest of the three because the base blend is. There is no decaf blonde bag; the Veranda VIA is as close as it gets for a gentle evening cup.

Buy whole bean and have the store grind it only if you have no grinder; ground coffee is stale within a week and beans hold for three. Match the bag to the brewer before you match it to a flavor, because a dark roast in a paper pour over and a blonde in a moka pot both disappoint for reasons that have nothing to do with the coffee. Check the roast date on the bottom of the bag; stores rotate stock but a bag can sit for months on a slow shelf.

The pickup prices at the reference store are in line with grocery prices for the same bags, and Rewards Stars apply in store. The espresso bags are the one place where the in-store purchase is worth it: Espresso Roast and Starbucks Blonde Espresso Roast are the exact coffees pulled at the counter, and a home machine with either of them gets closer to the store's latte than any other bag on the wall.

• First bag: Pike Place Roast, because it is the reference point everything else is measured against.
• Second bag: whichever direction the first one pushed you, blonde or dark.
• For a gift: a dark bag and a mug; the dark roasts are the ones people think of as Starbucks.
• For travel: a box of VIA Pike Place and a box of the iced coffee.
• Skip: buying ground coffee for a brewer you do not own yet.

The at-home wall is Starbucks' oldest business and it still covers the range well: a gentle blonde for black coffee, a balanced medium for the machine, a heavy dark for the press and the espresso maker, and instant packets for everywhere else. The section pages describe every bag's notes and the brewers it suits; there is no nutrition to compare, so the comparison is taste and format.

Bag availability changes with the seasons and single-origin coffees rotate through, so the wall in your store may hold bags this site does not list. The app shows what is stocked at a given location.