Delicious old coffee

One of the first things I picked up when I became seriously dedicated to coffee is how important freshness is. For a while I was studying roast dates on bags of beans that I was buying, sorting through the bags on display in shops, always making sure to get the absolute freshest beans available and of course completely ignoring any bag that did not have a roast date.

Later, after much struggling to get the grind and dose right on super fresh beans, I made peace with the fact that for espresso, a week is the least amount of time to wait before finding out how it tastes and I try to keep enough stock of a roast in order to be able to try batches roasted in a range of a week ago until a month or even a little more.

Of beans that I have roasted myself, I keep notes on the prints of the profiles and I also add notes that friends send me whom I have shipped bags of the same batch so I can compare how these beans do in my setup of Compak E8 and R120 grinders and Londinium espresso machine with setups like HG One and Strietman, or Mahlgut and Strega.

A rather light roast and the results on different systems and dates

A batch roasted somewhat light on July 25th was nothing special a week later on my setup but scored very good the same day on a Mahlgut/Strega system. On a coarser grind it did very well the next day for me and on August 5th, it was delicious without fault in the aftertaste on a GS/3. Five days later at a HG One / Strietman setup it was the best so far of any batch I'd sent Erik recently. By then almost none of these beans were left in my stock but I thoroughly cherished the last shots.

Yesterday a remarkable feedback came from Roemer Overdiep. He and I experimented with the Fracino Roastilino back in 2014. Unpacking boxes in his new home, Roemer came across a bag of beans that we roasted on the last day of 2014, almost 20 months ago. He'd saved the bag as a souvenir but since he was out of beans for his iSteel / La Pavoni Europiccola setup, he decided to give it a try because the smell coming from the beans was so good. Much to his surprise the taste was excellent! Herbal and nutty, not a trace of the acidity he remembered these beans had at the time.

Maybe the type of bag is of influence. I remember we bought a few of these silver bags and decided not to order more because they were expensive.
I wonder if this quality ageing can be reproduced and I will try to save some bags roasted these days to be tasted much later. I believe these were relatively small bags with no valve. One of the (sample) bags that I used at the time puffed up like a tightly packed sausage with the CO2 that was pushed out from the fresh beans in the few days after the roast. It is maybe a good idea to let the beans rest in a container with a lid for a day or two before storing them in these bags and sealing these bags. I ordered 100 more of them cheaply now (on sale).


PS: I searched and retrieved the roast profile of the above roast: