Cw?
From bad hand coffee:
As an industry, we’ve been obsessed with roast dates and pushing the freshness of coffee, but the word freshness could be considered a little misleading. It’s not quite as simple as you might think.
Marketing coffee as fresh used to mean something. It marked a difference to the big commodity coffee roaster that might have coffee sitting on a supermarket shelf that had been roasted six months (or more) ago. But our obsession with freshness could have swung us the other way, because when it comes to coffee, there IS such a thing as too fresh.
Coffee continues to develop after it’s been roasted, and the optimum time to enjoy that coffee might be later than you think. It’s not about drinking coffee as close to when it was roasted as possible. In general, coffee needs about a week to rest. Just roasted coffee needs to degas and release its CO2, to let the flavour compounds develop, and that takes a bit of time. Additionally, once the coffee has developed post-roast, it’s also stable for a much wider window of time than you might think too.
DEGASSING
In the first 24 hours after being roasted, coffee releases around 40% of its CO2. If we try to brew coffee in this window, it’s going to extract unevenly and have quite dull, dry flavours. As coffee degasses and ‘rests’ over several days, it eventually stabilises and will deliver MUCH more delicious and rounded flavours. So we need to be patient.
THE SWEET SPOT
It’s actually a much wider window than you might think. We’re talking weeks, not days after roasting. Most coffees start to hit the sweet spot about a week or two after being roasted and will continue to taste pretty damn good for a couple months at least, more like ten weeks really. The main thing is to enjoy it within around two to three months of the roasting date.
STORAGE
Your coffee oxidising is what’s going to kill its flavour, so storing it correctly is going to massively help prolong that sweet spot of flavour. Air tight containers are a great option, but just simply making sure your bag is rolled down and clipped shut, or sealed with its resealable strip works well too, just get all that air out. But bear in mind that heat and sunlight also have a role to play, so keep that bag out of the sun, maybe tucked in a cupboard (not the fridge.)
*BUT GROUND COFFEE IS DIFFERENT
Once coffee has been ground it will degrade very, very quickly. By opening up the coffee beans and drastically increasing the exposed surface area, the flavour compounds will oxidise and break down rapidly. For this reason alone, coffee needs to be brewed and consumed as close to when it was ground as possible. ‘Fresh ground coffee’ is something entirely different, and somewhat disconnected to when the coffee was roasted. So bear that in mind when you’re considering how to get the best from your coffee
