tompoland I’ve tested rest duration a lot. A caveat: most people don’t like it and will disagree with my conclusions but then again, most of them won’t have tested day after day like I have.

Light roasted beans are bit peak flavor after 30 days post roast.

With many batches of City roasts (Medium/Light) they have hit peak at 28 days or thereabouts.

It’s funny you come to this conclusion.

Both my sister and I have tested resting periods fairly extensively and that was our result also!! We assumed it was because we were using a bean to cup that it was different.

    JHCCoffee Question: What’s the right amount of headroom? Is the “nickle test” still true or passe? Or does the right amount of headroom result from a basket loaded to + or - 10% of basket rating, with neither sloppiness or the puck sticking to the shower screen? Or?

    The ideal fill height is related to shot quality, not whether or not pucks stick to the shower screen or knock out sloppy. You’re making espresso not pucks. A sloppy puck or one that is stuck to the shower screen doesn’t tell you anything about the shot.

      tompoland DrForinor I’ve tested rest duration a lot. A caveat: most people don’t like it and will disagree with my conclusions but then again, most of them won’t have tested day after day like I have.

      Light roasted beans are bit peak flavor after 30 days post roast.

      I tend to use what I consider to be medium roasts, and find that the coffee starts to peak at around 14 days, so not surprised that light roasts take longer. For me the golden window tends to be from ~day 14 until I finish the batch, so probably days 14-30. I usually don’t have anything left beyond that, so don’t know what happens after, but during that window I don’t feel any deterioration (I store the beans in vacuvin containers and pump the air out). When I see people say they start drinking on day 5 (considering that by day 14 the coffee could be gone), I think that they don’t know what they are missing.

      (But this is a thread about wdt, so not the best place to discuss resting times. :))

        Regardless of when the flavor peaks I’ve found it takes a very long time for the coffee to actually go rancid. I ran several batches through the Amazon and drank through a few kilos over a period of months. Flavour peaks were found on immediately opening the back after resting for a week, but then the next day it wasn’t ready to drink. The next peak came probably two-three weeks later and then another after 4 weeks. Same again for about 6/7 weeks. The reason for these different peaks was I found different flavours coming through and rising to dominance at different times, and some seeming to appear from out of nowhere as they were undetectable previously. Depending on the flavours you want you might interpret the peak differently. I can’t remember exactly how it was but I’m fairly confident floral notes were the first to go. Fruit became prominent after around 4 weeks and then tannins (black tea notes) and chocolate from 6/7 weeks with fruit that slowly died down over the next month or so. Floral notes then seemed to magically reappear but that would be a freshly opened bag. I was drinking coffee roasted at the start of August into December and was probably happiest with the complexity of flavour around October-November.

        I use a toothpick for WDT. Works great in my hands.

        My sense is that it’s not the WDT that’s the important thing. It’s winding up with an even distribution of ground coffee by whatever means so that you have a better chance of getting an even puck after tamping.

        A little while ago I tried an experiment where I deliberately distributed the coffee unevenly, tamped the heck out of it to overcome the unevenness, and still got a great shot of espresso. At the very least, this shows that WDT isn’t required for great espresso. Having said that, doing WDT with my toothpick and then tamping is a far easier way of achieving that result, so that’s why I do it.

        The fact that people seem to be able to achieve great results with a variety of WDT tools is another sign to me that the end product (reasonably well-distributed coffee) is the important thing, not how you get there.