Illy roasted coffee beans. Box of six 8.8oz cans.

...how come Amazon stopped selling it under Amazon Prime? I once bought this regularly, but I won't if I have to pay shipping and wait for much longer than 2 days for delivery.

Coffee taste is a personal preference. I love coffee and Illy medium roast espresso beans are among my favorites. That's not why I buy Illy for the office however. I buy it for use in my office because the beans stay perfectly fresh in the super sturdy sealed cans for a very long time. Three month old cans open as fresh as 3 day old cans. So, I can buy 6 cans at a time, and never run out!

Illy espresso beans are my favorite of all the widely available commercially produced roasted espresso beans. This is the standard medium roast that Illy produces and it is a bit less aggressive and milder tasting than the dark roasts of Lavazza (the other major Italian brand that some people favor).

When properly ground, tamped, and brewed Illy espresso has a delightful aroma and flavor, unmatched by any of the other brands.

Granted, Illy is quite pricey, and I do not use it all the time for this reason. However, you get what you pay for. Usually, I buy my espresso from a small roasting house in the Midwest that produces a decent medium roast substitute that I do not mind using most of the time. But Illy definitely produces a higher quality bean.

One way to judge the quality of roasted espresso beans even before you taste the coffee that they will produce is to look at the evenness of color and size of the beans. The reason is that beans of a uniform size tend to roast more evenly than beans of varying sizes. Moreover, even when the beans are of a uniform size, it is important that they be roasted in small batches and churned during the the entire roasting process to ensure that they all get roasted to the same point. This is why most high quality coffee is roasted in small batches in a rotating drum that roasts all the beans to the exact same point. Moreover, since the moisture content of the beans varies a bit from batch to batch, quality control in the roasting process is extremely important. And it is here that Illy is unmatched. Just do a simple visual comparison of the color and consisteny of Illy beans when compared to any of the other widely available brands and you can easily see why Illy is the best.