‘Stay Fresh’ When should you crack the seal on your coffee?
It’s been baked into our brain. The fresher the roast date the better the coffee…right? If I just roasted and packaged some beans yesterday, you’d assume they’d be drinking their best in just a few short days? Well not so fast my coffee compadres.
More and more articles are being penned by roasters all over the world clamouring for coffee drinkers to wait three, four, even five weeks after a roast date to crack open their coffee. How can this be? Do we really need to let coffee rest for weeks to hit optimum taste profiles? Isn’t fresher always better?
The answer is a bit more complicated than that— and has more to do with how we define the term “fresh”. The fact is, the roasting process isn’t technically finished when you dump, cool, and package your beans. There’s still a lot of science happening in that bag of coffee that takes time to fully develop. As a roaster, you desperately need the excess C02 from the roasting process to essentially bleed off from the beans and fully escape the bag. That’s why most coffee bags have a built in C02 valve which allows C02 to leave without any excess oxygen re-entering the bag.
But it’s more than just bleeding C02, the timeframe can also depend on the way it was roasted. For instance, roasters that use hot air (like those roasted by yours truly) seem to benefit more from a longer resting time. Larger drum roasters powered by gas use conductive heat transfer. And according to science, conductive heat helps make beans more porous, develops them quicker, and essentially can allow for less resting time. But as with so many conundrums in the coffee world, this isn’t a hard and fast rule either. Light to medium roasts benefit the most from a longer resting time as the C02 and flavour development need some extra time on the clock (2-3 weeks and sometimes as long as 8 weeks!), but darker roasts where you’ve presumably taken the beans to a more porous and fully developed state need substantially less resting time (only 4-6 days).
Even still, understanding where a coffee was grown adds another important element in deciphering when you should pull out the grinder. Typically higher altitude coffees in Kenya, Guatemala, or Columbia can stand to rest longer than a lower altitude coffee from Brazil. It’s generally known that it takes longer for that C02 to fully release from a higher altitude coffee and therefore they can stand the rest.
One thing is certain, it’s due time that we change our perception of what fresh coffee truly means, and use the roast date as just one indicator of when coffee can be best enjoyed. Paying attention to how it was roasted, where it was roasted, and what style it was roasted to is just as important as when it was roasted. Factoring in all of these variables helps unlock the complex and delicious flavours in your coffee. So give it a rest!