What is Fresh Coffee?
Can coffee be too fresh?
Fresh coffee. There’s nothing better than a freshly roasted bag of beans, right? The fresher the better.
But is that true? And what makes a coffee “fresh”? Freshly harvested? Freshly roasted the day before? And is there actually a linear relationship between freshness and quality? If we were to shake the branch of a ripe coffee tree over a hot roaster, then dropped those still-hot beans from the roaster directly into a grinder, is that going to result in the best cup of coffee you’ve ever had?
The real truth about fresh beans, like most things in coffee, is much more complex, and doesn’t benefit from a one-size-fits all approach.
Fresh green coffee
Specialty Coffee has a tendency to work with what is called fresh crop coffee. This is coffee that comes from the most recent harvest. Considering coffee’s journey from a cherry on a tree to a processed seed in a roasting machine can take 3-9 months of processing and transit when all goes right, even “fresh” green coffee is months removed from the plant by the time it reaches our warehouses.
Worry not, however. Many roasters, myself included, will tell you that these extremely “fresh” coffees actually benefit from further resting time after arrival. This can be due to the bean needing to dry further, needing to acclimate to the humidity of the space, needing rest for molecular reactions like Maillard to occur, honestly - who knows. But what I can tell you is that a great deal of coffee scores much higher after sitting in our space for a month or two. Now of course this comes with diminishing returns - coffee that is too old begins to lose acidity and take on taints of age, but if the point is to question the relationship between quality and age, without question green coffee can be too fresh.
Fresh roasted coffee
Fresh roasted coffee is no better. When we are doing quality control in the roastery, we don’t bother cupping coffees until they’ve sat for a minimum of 24 hours, and if we need to pull espresso shots, we don’t touch it for 10 days. Why? This is where we have to delve into some simple kitchen science.
When you roast coffee, it produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide. When you hit the bean with hot water, the coffee expands and all of that carbon dioxide is released. That carbon dioxide actually creates a barrier around the grind, and pushes water away from the surface of the coffee, resulting in a weaker and less sweet coffee due to less contact.
This is why, when you order a coffee from your favourite coffee shop, you’re usually getting coffee that has been aged. That’s right, your baristas let the coffee sit on their shelves for 7-21 days before using it, because it makes for a better cup.
Any notion we have of fresh roasts making for better cups likely comes from marketing teams looking to simplify systems that can’t be simplified, or consumers looking at a roast date and trying to infer what this piece of data means.
In reality, the relationship between quality and fresh roasts is more of a bell curve. Quality improves in the first week or three after roasting, and after a month what makes it special slowly degrades. It will not “go bad”, but even the most spectacular coffee may just become coffee flavoured coffee after 2 or 3 months. That said, I’ve had incredible cups of coffee using beans that were almost a year old.
Fresh ground coffee
The only rush to brew comes after grinding - this is where freshness matters. A whole coffee bean is essentially a natural tupperware container - it does an awesome job of protecting a host of volatile aromatics, many of which dissipate within minutes of grinding. So age your coffee, and grind it fresh!
“Best Taste After”
To help guide you towards the best cup possible, in addition to the roast date, we’ve added a “best taste after” sticker to our bags. Some coffees benefit from longer or shorter rest times, but at a minimum we recommend 7 days.
To prolong this window of quality on your end, keep your beans well sealed, and away from direct sunlight. If you know you won’t be using your beans within a few months, you can extend their life by keeping your well sealed beans in your (clean, deodorized) freezer.