Tassimo Costa Americano

The Costa take on a black coffee at home

Costa Americano is Tassimo’s single-disc black-coffee option in Costa’s branding. £30.49 for an 80-disc bulk pack on Amazon UK, 38.1p per cup, slightly below L’OR Espresso XL‘s 42.7p in the same system.

The two T-Discs are similar in everything except flavour profile. L’OR XL leans more European, Costa Americano leans more like a high-street British chain coffee. Which one’s better is genuinely down to whose flavour you prefer.

What an Americano means here

A Costa Americano in-store is an espresso shot lengthened with hot water. The Tassimo version brews the same idea differently: the T-Disc contains pre-ground coffee at a higher dose than the L’OR XL, and the machine pulls a longer, slightly weaker pour (around 220ml) directly into the cup.

The result is a longer black coffee than the L’OR XL, drunk more like a filter coffee than an espresso. It’s the closest Tassimo gets to a “morning mug of coffee” without invoking the lattes or hot chocolates.

Taste profile

Costa’s roast leans medium-dark with a recognisable bitter edge that’s part of the brand’s house style. The Tassimo version captures most of that profile, with notes of dark cocoa and a slight smoky aftertaste. In a side-by-side with L’OR XL, Costa Americano has more bitterness and slightly more weight on the palate; L’OR XL is cleaner and slightly lighter.

If you order Costa coffee on the high street, this is the home version. If you order Pret or Caffè Nero, the closest pod equivalents are in the Tassimo branded range too, but the flavour gap is smaller than the box would suggest.

In milk

Costa Americano works as a base for a homemade flat white if you steam milk separately, but the longer pour dilutes the coffee character compared to using L’OR XL or Tassimo Espresso Classico. For milk drinks, the two-disc Costa Latte sleeve is the proper Tassimo answer, and Americano is the wrong pod to start from.

Bottom line

Buy Costa Americano if you specifically want Costa-flavoured black coffee at home. Buy L’OR Espresso XL if you don’t care about chain-coffee branding and want the cleaner, more neutral version at the same price.

Subscribe and Save discount runs at about 10%, bringing the per-cup cost to roughly 34p. The 80-disc box is a real bulk commitment: at one cup a day, it lasts roughly twelve weeks, and the freshness window starts pushing past comfortable territory after about three months opened.

For households where some people drink Costa Americano and some drink lattes, the Americano single-disc plus Costa Latte two-disc combination gives you a flexible Costa-branded set-up at home. That’s roughly Tassimo’s main marketing pitch, and at this price it broadly works.