I wrote to Boar_d_laze raving about an Ethiopian I roasted that I had given to my son to try. My son just wants a cup of coffee, not a fruity nuanced cup with a chocolatey finish and buttery mouth-feel. He's just coming off of a love affair with Starbucks that started in high school. He created the Coffee Club and got funded by the school district. But that's another story.

I roasted up some Rwandan way into second crack that he finds acceptable and took back the Ethiopian. This was nine days past roast. The coffee was fantastic, and I'm not that skilled of a roaster yet.

Rich said

I think that unless you're storing it in your grinder's hopper, espresso needs at least 6 days post-roast to get rid of the unrested harshness. In my opinion, it's still fresh enough to drink on day 21.
Days 8 - 12 are my favorite.

In all the time I have been roasting coffee, my small batches don't even last seven days.

Let's discuss this.

How far are you taking your roasts?

When I first started roasting, I'd regularly take a lot of beans to the start of second crack - I would find that staling would occur around day 7. Now I drop well before second crack (say 1:00 to 1:20 prior to 2C). Now the beans continue to drink well until about day 21.

T

I'm rarely going into 2C except for said son.
The Ethiopian was roasted past 1Ce with one minute of additional development; no snaps of 2C, dropped at 415F.

If we're talking about coffee roasted for espresso, I find my roasts to be pretty rough the first few days. One thing I like to do is to open the sealed container of beans every day and immediately pull a handful up to my nose. By the 4th or 5th day, the smell starts having all these complex fruity, herbal, perfumey notes. The acidity calms down, as do the rough edges. It does start to lose body, but that's an acceptable tradeoff for me. Having worked for a big espresso roasting company, I can say that their coffee was always better (kept in the outgassing bag) after a week or even more. All the roasts I'm talking about are dropped right at the first few snaps of SC.

When I was roasting to second crack for espresso years ago, the sweet spot for *my* tastes were 3-5 days post roast. For brewed coffee, generally my sweet spot is 1-3 days.

This is quite subjective however. The best thing you can do is split a batch, put one half in the freezer tightly sealed, while leaving the other on the counter. After x days, brew them both and see which you prefer.