Knluk For Illy, are you referring to beans or ground? Do they normally have a brew date?
Illy tins have two dates: a ‘Best Before End’ date, with month and year, and a ‘packaged’ (ICS) date with a day, month and year (and time of day).
The ‘BBE’ date is useless, but the ‘packaged’ date gives you a good idea of when the beans were roasted; if (unlikely) it’s recent, then a few weeks of useful life can be inferred (say 6-8 weeks from packaging date*); if it’s months old, the coffee will be fine when just opened, but will deteriorate in the space of a few days.
* You’ll read all sorts of dates for shelf life of roasted coffee, ranging from 2-3 weeks to 6-9 months from roasting. This is one of those areas where you need to make your own personal opinion up on what “still tastes good” to you, and that may very well vary by beans and brewing method. The 6-8 weeks is when I find that Illy beans (which I use often) start tasting mostly of burnt wood, rather than nice coffee; I’m well known for not having a particularly discriminating nose or palate…