Changing just one word of Don Holly's article excerpt makes it perhaps a more accurate description of the current state of affairs:

"While our Retail Roaster members focus on the issue of time-maintaining a 3 to 7 day window is optimum for best results-many of our Wholesale Roaster members pretend that today's packaging technology greatly expands this period of time into weeks or even months."

Fair enough - but pretend or otherwise, to the extent the organization represents these folks, you cannot expect the SCAA to easily adopt standards which their members and supporters do not all agree with.

Thats the hypocrisy of their position. If you ask them they all heartily agree that freshness is of primary importance. Everyone yaps about how important it is to specialty coffee. Then when you try and introduce the idea of setting a standard for this oh-so-important element of specialty coffee it becomes a prickly subject. Yeah, we want to be part of specialty coffee, but no we do not want any standards that may impede our sales.
Organic coffee standards, fair trade coffee standards don't seem to be a problem endorsed by the organization. Funny that something that enhances the profit line and is handled by a third party is no problem, but something like freshness standards that no other party has an interest in and no other party has nearly the expertise as the SCAA has is such an impossible task. Come to think of it, I don't recall them ever polling the membership as to whether we would want such a standard set.
Bernie

Trish Skeie on canning specialty coffees: http://www.taylormaidfarms.com/learn_co ... st_04.html.

Interesting. In my every-other-daily stop at Groundwork for a bagel on my morning ride, I've noticed that they offer canned beans - perhaps I'll have to try one when I run out the increasingly excessive bean supply in my freezer...

In any case, to those who feel strongly about it, is Ms. Skeie just pretending (i.e., flat out lying) when she says "We cupped six-month-old [canned] coffee against a just roasted coffee. The canned coffee tasted exactly like the fresh roast for at least five days, the time that we assume it would take a consumer to go through a 12-ounce can."? Do you assume the coffee she started with was #$%& to begin with? What is the explanation? Does Illy's text address this subject in any depth?

As a separate question, I note that she refers repeatedly to vacuum packing, but says Illy's research shows positive pressure, above atmospheric, to be preferable - is she using these interchangeably, or does anyone actually can with positive pressure?

JimWright wrote:In any case, to those who feel strongly about it, is Ms. Skeie just pretending (i.e., flat out lying) when she says "We cupped six-month-old [canned] coffee against a just roasted coffee. The canned coffee tasted exactly like the fresh roast for at least five days, the time that we assume it would take a consumer to go through a 12-ounce can."? Do you assume the coffee she started with was #$%& to begin with? What is the explanation? Does Illy's text address this subject in any depth?

Trish isn't lying. If she says it tasted the same it did. She has a well developed palate and is a trained cupper. I'd be interested in trying this myself. If I'm wrong, I'll be the first to admit it. The idea that 6-month old coffee tastes the same as fresh roasted.......
Bernie

Aren't cupping and espresso wildly different ways of making coffee? The fact that cupping is indicative of certain characteristics in espresso when the beans are fresh does not mean that it detects aging problems. My own tolerance of old preground coffee used in a Melior (French Press) is much, much higher than my tolerance of aging beans used in espresso.

Greg

Agreed Greg. The point was that there seems to be legitimate debate in the community around what constitutes fresh coffee - not just folks who pretend for their own convenience that anything more than a week or two out of the roaster could be fresh.

coffeefrog wrote:The fact that cupping is indicative of certain characteristics in espresso when the beans are fresh does not mean that it detects aging problems.

I don't know what this means.

As I understand it, cupping is not done by making espresso. It is thus an imperfect way of judging how an espresso will turn out and will show defects in the coffee beans in different ways to actual espresso making. Or am I misunderstanding cupping?