I roasted and shipped some coffee yesterday, and It got me thinking about roast dates. As any of you who have bought my coffee before know, I list the Roasted On date prominently on the front of the bag. I make it obvious when my coffee was roasted because I feel that it is important for the consumer to know how fresh their coffee is, and because I have nothing to hide concerning the freshness of my coffee.

I’ll warn you that this statistic is being made up on the spot, but I would guess that only about 10-15% of Americans have drank freshly roasted coffee. Even with the rapid growth of Specialty Coffee, the majority of people drink Instant Coffee or pre-ground coffee from a large brand such as Folger’s and Maxwell House.

One of the easiest ways to differentiate Specialty Coffee from Commodity Coffee is the roast date. Specialty Coffee should be freshly roasted and have the roast date displayed on the package. If the roast date is not on your bag of coffee, then it is probably not freshly roasted, which means that you should not be paying a premium for it. If a company claims to be selling high quality coffee but hides the roast date from you, then you have to wonder what else they are hiding.

Some of the details about what makes Specialty Coffee taste better are hard to convey in just a few seconds of conversation, but when most coffee was roasted an unknown number of weeks ago, freshly roasted coffee can be easily identified by a printed roast date.

In a previous post I said this: “Once roasted, coffee loses its flavor over time. If coffee is not ground up and brewed within 15-30 days after roasting, the unique flavors that so many people have worked hard to preserve are mostly gone. This is why specialty coffee roasters will mark on the package when their coffee was roasted, so the consumer knows when to brew it by.”

Freshly roasted coffee is kind of similar to freshly baked bread. There is very little you can do to keep fresh bread from going stale after a few days/weeks. Roasted Coffee is similar in that regard, since oxygen is responsible for the deterioration in both. Some people will tell you that coffee is not worth drinking if it was roasted over 2 weeks ago. I am much less staunch about this because I have had many delicious cups of coffee that were brewed with coffee that was older than 14 days after roast. Yes, some of the complexity that makes that coffee unique is gone, but the coffee is still very tasty.

I recommend brewing your coffee within a month after it was roasted, at the latest. Once your coffee is older than 3 weeks, the decline in quality is fairly noticeable, and after 4 weeks the quality is significantly diminished. Roasted coffee is meant to be brewed and consumed quickly, not stored for months.

Now, with all of that being said, there are still exceptions to the rule. Every coffee from every country of the world is slightly different in the way it can taste, and these differences seem to extend to freshness as well. Some coffees flavor deteriorates rapidly after a week or two, while some coffees decline more slowly. Often it seems that coffee from Sumatra tastes its best 1 or 2 weeks after it was roasted, while a coffee from another region might taste best 3-4 days after it was roasted. So while all coffee tastes best before it is a month old, there are some differences in how fast particular coffees go stale.

Hopefully this helps you understand a little about why it makes a big difference if your coffee was freshly roasted.