A bag of coffee carries a lot of words. An origin, a farm, an altitude, three tasting notes, sometimes a paragraph about the family who grows it. Most of those words are true. None of them says whether the coffee inside is worth drinking today, and one small line does: the roast date.
What happens after roasting
Roasted coffee is not stable. In the first days it releases carbon dioxide faster than water can get through it, which is why a very fresh coffee blooms like a cake in the dripper and pours unevenly. Then it settles, and for a few weeks it is exactly what the roaster meant it to be. After that the aromatics that make a coffee taste of apricot or hazelnut leave, in the order they arrived: the fruit first, then the sweetness, then the body. What remains is brown and warm and tastes of nothing in particular.
The timing depends on the roast and on the bag, but for a filter coffee the window is roughly this:
- Days 1 to 3: resting. Drinkable, but the pour fights you.
- Days 4 to 35: the coffee as roasted.
- Weeks 6 to 8: still pleasant, slowly flattening.
- After that: coffee, in the generic sense.
Why a best before date says nothing
A best before date is set eighteen months out because the coffee is safe to drink for eighteen months, which is true and beside the point. A bag that prints only that date is telling you it would rather you did not do the arithmetic. We print the roast date, on the bag, in the same size as the name of the coffee, and if a bag ever reaches you more than ten days after that date, write to us and we will replace it.
A coffee is not old because it was roasted a long time ago. It is old because you could not tell.
How to read the date on our bags
The date is the Tuesday the batch went through the drum. Orders leave on the Wednesday. Rest a natural three days and a washed coffee two, then drink it inside six weeks. If you buy for a household that drinks one cup a day, a 250 gram bag is the right size, and a 1 kilo bag is not, whatever the price per gram says.