I have noticed that espresso pucks in the bucket don't have that coffee aroma pumping out into the room the way other coffee grinds do. We run nearly 100% espresso here and there are several pucks sitting in the knockbox 24 hours a day with little to no scent of them in the house.

When I grind coffee I get more fragrance than what I smell from the pucks. If I do a pourover, once in a blue moon - that's tomorrow BTW, the scent from that will linger in the house for a long time, and if I don't dispose of the spent grounds outside it will smell up the whole house.

It's not that I'm so used to the scent of coffee either. We just don't smell it for the most part. When I walk into any cafe I smell much more fragrance and aroma from coffee. My coffee is fresh, fragrant and delicious so it's not cardboard beans. (Mostly from Bodka)

So is is because of the pressurized extraction that we are catching those aromatics in the crema and espresso? Why the huge difference? Anybody else ever noticed this? I just wonder why...

With such a fine grind, there is much more surface area exposed to oxygen, moisture etc,(to make coffee go stale), therefore aromatic properties disperse at a much quicker rate

Thanks for the opinions there. You're probably right, a smaller particle size must let us extract quite a bit of flavor as well as let the puck offgas that much quicker.