I have been thinking lately about the process of buying coffee. For me, its fresh roasted since I don't home roast. What spurred all of this was the following event. I bought a bag of Ethiopian coffee from a very well known San Francisco coffee roaster. It was roasted the day before I bought it, and I started brewing it about 4 days post roast. I continued to brew it over the course of about 12 days post roast.

No matter what I did with this coffee I couldn't for the life of me get any flavor out of it. It was always flat and tasted like saw dust (for lack of better term). I noticed something I originally thought nothing of. The bag said it was harvested over a year ago (about 15 months). Then I thought, maybe that means something and did some searching. I came across this..

http://www.jimseven.com/2016/08/09/a-ch ... sh-coffee/

Then I also noticed that Intelligentsia specifies coffees that are "in season" or not.

https://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/coffee/in-season

So the question is: how many of you use the harvest time as a factor in deciding to buy a coffee or not? The availability of this info at roasters is spotty at best and confusing when the year is left off....

Here's a thread from a couple years back:

Green coffee beans shelf life

I remember reading up on this a while back and it essentially seems to boil down to some greens degrade faster than others but regardless it seems best to keep the greens sealed, away from sunlight, and in a dry climate controlled environment. I keep my greens indoors (not in the garage where I roast) and have hung onto some greens for about 1-1.5 years. I noticed that for some, not all, the ones that hung around the year and a half mark didn't taste quite as good as when I first used them.

Thanks for the insightful post! I am less concerned with green coffee shelf life and storage methods and more referring to buying close to harvest. The only difference there is we have no control how they are stored before we get them, so presumably how we store them afterward doesn't change that.

And, I'm more personally focused on buying roasted coffee based on harvest timing and less focused on greens. Although their are factors playing into each other there..

So really I'm interested in the actual selection process and the resulting quality. Meaning, you go to the store and select produce based on freshness, seasonality, etc.. how you store the produce after is another topic.

I once took part in a demonstration by George Howell where we blind cupped coffees that were (control) new crop and ground fresh, versus (A) that had been ground fresh but was past crop stored in a jute bag, and (B) ground a week previously and new crop, stored in a grainpro bag. The tasters were unanimous, much to our surprise, that the past crop coffee was far worse than the one ground a week past. It is SOP to ship green coffees in jute bags and keep them that way for up to a year. Clearly, this is not a good SOP. Green coffee needs to be carefully stored. Freezing helps, grainpro bags help; but its still an open question one what is both economical and what works best.

Talking about fruit -- according to a CNN video I recently saw, supermarket apples can be a year old. They are harvested September through October. Those sold before the new year are stored in normal refrigerated warehouses; those sold after that are stored in special oxygen depleted warehouses, so they ripen more slowly and can be sold all year. The apples you get now were picked six months ago.

YMMV, but I'm still going to buy these ancient apples, since I'm enough of a science junkie to think that clever ways of doing long term storage are cool. It also shows that there's a lot of room for ingenuity left in the matter of coffee storage.

Very interesting! So when you are buying coffee, is how recently it was harvested a major factor? Or "in season" as Intelly calls it?

Come to think of it, I'm fairly certain the green coffee stock in the back of this roaster was in jute bags.

Regarding apples, I agree and buy apples year round. That said it's very clear that some are terrible and some are great! I can only presume that the terrible ones were that way before storage. Or, maybe the storage conditions were not as good...

... It is SOP to ship green coffees in jute bags and keep them that way for up to a year. ...Green coffee needs to be carefully stored. Freezing helps, grainpro bags help; but its still an open question one what is both economical and what works best.

The grainpro costs the farmer/processor $3/bag for a grainpro. Twelve years ago when I started distributing greens the ratio of grainpro to jute was 15:85. Now, recent experience shows that GP to jute ratio at 85 (or more):15 for specialty coffee.

These days ALL my greens except Cuban come in Grainpro, seems to have become more or less industry standard. I'm also finding that the general quality of sorting is way up, with grade 4 Ethiopians looking better that grade 2's used to a few years back. To return to the original post:

dry processed Ethiopian coffees don't seem to last that well, big difference after only a few month's storage even with ideal conditions.
But high grown washed Central American beans can last over a year or more.

Alan

If I bought coffee that tastes like cardboard from a specialty roaster, I would ask for a refund or substitute.

For home roasting I've vacuum packed and stored greens that roast up really well, but that batch seems to be stale.

This has happened to me multiple times, and beyond frustrating (because I rarely buy pro roasted beans as I home roast).

Each time with super light roasted, heirloom beans....

Until I realized the importance of WATER. Being in Ohio, if you're buying beans from california, they were roasted to their water spec (which is far different from us). This was actually quite an enlightening moment for me, the more I researched it, the more I realized others had this similar eureka moment with using proper water. It's not just using spring water or filtered water, you really need the right minerals to extract those notes that are seemingly hard to extract in super light roasts.

Ryan - Maybe it is the bean, green or roasted, BUT what kind of water are you using? I STRONGLY recommend you look up matt perger's water recipe and add that to distilled water. Or for an easier, excellent solution, try third wave water. Very interested to hear what water you're using...

Hi Dale. I certainly appreciate the feedback. Its not my water though. I have a good handle on that. My typical is pretty soft usually at the bottom of the SCAA guidelines. Sometimes even a tad softer for my espresso machine. I have analyzed everything with reagent kits.

Ive also made 70/30 water just for fun, which is pointless because its the same "genetic makeup" as the filtered tap + distilled water I usually make.

My issue is not brewing coffee in general. It was brought up by this specific bag that I notice was harvested well over a year ago. This one tasted flat and woody no matter what, even at 4 days post roast and on.