swines wrote:While the coffee may be losing some aromatics while it rests, you seem to ignore the fact that the oils and sugars continue to combine, develop, and change after roasting for a period of time. The flavor development of the beans doesn't stop at the moment the beans have cooled to room temperature.

By using the coffee immediately, you've not given the chemistry in the bean that was started by roasting time to finish. Flavor development is really a better term than "staling" - which is neither accurate nor descriptive of what is happening within the bean after roasting. Staling means to be made unpalatable from age.

If coffee develops better flavor because you've allowed the chemistry that was started by roasting to fully finish - that, by definition can't be staling as the flavor has been improved and not degraded.

I've avoided participating in this thread because I wasn't sure I really had anything substantive to say that had not been said. But I do like your last sentence as it more or less sums up my opinion.

There is a point in the aging of coffee where nothing good can happen and only bad will happen. For me, that point seems to come around day 10 after roasting if the coffee is to be used for espresso. Since I don't drink very much coffee prepared by other methods I won't try to extrapolate my espresso experience to these other techniques other than to say that most people think that the point after which nothing "good" happens is a few days longer for these other brewing techniques.

To me, staling is what happens to the flavor when the roasted beans have completed whatever positive evolution they can complete, and only bad things can happen. It is analogous to what happens to wine as it goes "downhill," such as most California white wines held for more than 2 years. But then, you can age an Alsatian Riesling or a real French Chablis for 20 years and for most of that time positive things can balance out or even overpower whatever "bad" is going on.

Staling is a very loaded term that assumes that all oxidative reactions are "bad." If this were true the marketplace would not support such products as tawny port, or aged cheeses, and we'd be much the poorer for it.

ken

I posted on CG questioning the relationship of outgassing and staling. Is the CO2 escaping the bean related to staling in the first couple of days and oxidation after that? Is internal pressure of the CO2 in the bean what drives the outgassing? Could pressurising a container with CO2 stop that process and therefore keeping beans from going stale? Bob Bazzara started me thinking along these lines, but left off before actually hinting at the answers to these questions. Anyone else able to contribute actual data or are we waiting for Bob to get back here?

another_jim wrote:Buy a can of Illy beans and decide for yourself.

I've had the Illy beans, and I wasn't overly impressed. They weren't horrible, but I've had better from our local roasters here in Tucson. Does Porf Illy pack his beans in cans pressurised with CO2?

Ken Fox wrote:There is a point in the aging of coffee where nothing good can happen and only bad will happen. For me, that point seems to come around day 10 after roasting if the coffee is to be used for espresso.
ken

Ken,

I would add some details to your point here. If we plot taste quality on the y-axis and time in days on the x-axis I think we would get an irregular graph. It would show rapid increase in quality over the first two or three days, then a level plateau for about 3 or 4 days then a steady decline in taste quality of varying rates of change. I would identify your "point after which only bad happens" at about 6-7 days. Somewhere in that time frame a roast loses its single quality and becomes generic -- a Brazil Faz. Cruz Branca becomes generic Brazil. Some roasts lose quality more rapidly than others in the 6-10 day window.

One can see similar graphs about wine in Jancis Robinson's Vintage Timecharts (plotted in years not days).

KS

KarlSchneider wrote:Ken,

I would add some details to your point here. If we plot taste quality on the y-axis and time in days on the x-axis I think we would get an irregular graph. It would show rapid increase in quality over the first two or three days, then a level plateau for about 3 or 4 days then a steady decline in taste quality of varying rates of change. I would identify your "point after which only bad happens" at about 6-7 days. Somewhere in that time frame a roast loses its single quality and becomes generic -- a Brazil Faz. Cruz Branca becomes generic Brazil. Some roasts lose quality more rapidly than others in the 6-10 day window.

One can see similar graphs about wine in Jancis Robinson's Vintage Timecharts (plotted in years not days).

KS

Of course all of this is a matter of personal taste. The great majority of the time, the coffee I drink is between 3 days and 7 or 8 days old. It is rare for anything much older than a week to be in my grinder. I do a fair amount of freezing, however, of which I am a proponent if it is done right. Doing it right to me means that the freshly roasted coffee, straight out of my sample roaster, is in a sealed mason jar in a very cold freezer within an hour of the end of the roast. Beans frozen this way will continue to degas when you take the jar out of the freezer and let it reach room temperature again. I personally can't tell the difference other than that the beans don't absolutely stop maturing in the freezer, just the process is markedly reduced, so if you take out 1 month old beans from the freezer they may be the equivalent of a couple of days old in the aging process had they never been frozen. With previously frozen beans, they never stay frozen more than 3 months (usually, it is seldom more than 6 weeks), are kept at at least -10 degrees Fahrenheit, and are not repeatedly defrosted and refrozen. Generally I defrost the previously frozen beans and they are used up within 4 days of having been defrosted.

So, I don't have much experience with 10 day old beans although I would not automatically toss them as I would 11 day old beans

(actually true; you have to have cutoffs in your life at some point)

As to Jancis Robinson's comments on the aging of wine; I haven't seen them but she is a superstar wine critic. I can say that with wine and with coffee, you can't speak in absolutes since storage conditions differ. I live in a dry climate where it is seldom hot. This likely has an impact on how rapidly coffee deteriorates after it is roasted. As to wine, I have an underground storage area whose temperature ranges from 50F-59F over the course of the year with the great majority of that time spent at the lower end. When I look at vintage charts such as the ones that Robert Parker puts out every few months, invariably I find that my wines are less evolved, less ready, and much less likely to be "over the hill" than his chart would indicate. Storage conditions matter and I think this is not just true of wine, it is true of coffee also.

ken

...merged with thread on related topic by moderator...

I've sampled some SO coffees with my lever machine, but have come back to espresso blends. I'm fortunate to have a great local roaster from whom I can buy coffee the day after its been roasted. I've been trying to get a sense of how the beans age, when they peak, when they're getting a bit old. I seem to like the coffee best the first week, but this may be due to the fact that it produces much more creama early on.

Anyone have an opinion on rest times and aging of espresso blends? How does roast, bean type, etc effect resting time?

PC

Take a look at the Why coffee needs to rest before making espresso thread.

Well, that answers that...Thanks.