Jim Schulman wrote:

If you are selling generic coffee, making it completely stale is a great way to ensure consistency and to cut raw material costs. Since most Italian espresso is generic, they stale it as a matter of course.... [also], that, of course, doesn't mean that the espresso manufacturers haven't been making claims like you report. The whole topic of coffee freshness is almost entirely made up of empty assertions, posturing, and obscurantism. Coffee is a market with lots of niches; each niche has its own freshness and storage practices, and each niche claims theirs is optimal. Therefore the claims contradict each other, and none make much sense.

About staling to create a generic taste, and then selling this with hyperbole, try Illy!

Okay, it wasn't Italy but San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. A new coffee bar featuring Illy beans and their shiny branded machine opened on my block. The barista there (not Italian but claiming decades in the business) told me that coffee is a science and the Illy company, as the master of this, has determined that if they store their coffee in inert gas for 6 months, this makes the oil go back into the beans and ages it, something others don't do.

Michael Benis wrote:

You get what you expect. Not too bitter, not too bland, with a caffeine kick and a lingering aftertaste to see you on your way.

I tasted the shot, freshly ground in a Super Jolly from these aged beans and it was very smooth and completely undistinguished. It gave me a reliable caffeine dose, was very low acid, and had a very mellow aftertaste that lingered. Kind of like a bottle of very inexpensive California table wine blended for softness and heavy bodied but having none of the complexity of fine wine. I described the pleasure I find of coffee sometimes reminding me of many different kinds of flavors, citrus, for instance. He would have none of it, saying that citrus flavor in a coffee must be either because they're adding it to cut bitterness -- yes, I've been introduced to rubbing lemon peel on the rim of the cup for that purpose, but he missed the point -- or, he said, it's a flaw in the coffee.

Then again, there does seem to be a difference between purposeful aging and the dreadful taste of ground coffee sealed in humid air and left to degrade for months. But that would be the subject of another thread.

To bring my part of the discussion back on course, dosers are also designed to remedy clumping and fluff up the grounds, aren't they? I've replaced the doser on my Super Jolly with a doserless funnel and now need to break up the clumps using the Weiss Distribution Technique (WDT) /weiss-dist ... nique.html. I'm aware of the discussions elsewhere here about doser versus doserless, WDT and clumping, so rather than invite that sort of discussion I thought someone might know the history of doser design for grind quality.

Dr Gary wrote:Then again, there does seem to be a difference between purposeful aging and the dreadful taste of ground coffee sealed in humid air and left to degrade for months. But that would be the subject of another thread.

It would be interesting to know if Folger's tasted more or less dreadful when fresh. My guess is more dreadful, since they stopped selling fresh coffee a long time ago, and have every incentive to use coffees that are so bad, they actually improve when ground and canned.

drgary wrote:To bring my part of the discussion back on course, dosers are also designed to remedy clumping and fluff up the grounds, aren't they?

This seems unlikely. Dosers are designed for dosing in commercial establishments: one pull on the doser for singles, two pulls for doubles. The doser must be kept full of grinds for this to work properly, and "automatic" grinders ensure this by grinding a dozen doses when the level drops. AFAIK the shotgun-style lever flicking to improve distribution is a more recent phenomenon, and one that you would seldom see in an Italian espresso bar.

Jim, it actually gets worse than Folger's! For a kick I wrote a thread on "coffee cupping as necropsy" during my recent visit to Maui, when I actually tried the bagged coffee carelessly provided by the hotel. As one of our resident expert cuppers, you must have written somewhere about the telltale signs of staling and the various causes of that, but here's my recent and amateur attempt: Maui recommendations?

John, I wonder whether distribution of fluffy grounds was a concurrent part of the design for commercial establishments, since dosing there has to be consistent as well as quick and easy? What components of a doser deal with static and clumping, etc.? My Super Jolly has a wire mesh at the chute that deals with static, but I don't know if that was the first anti-static device.

drgary wrote:John, I wonder whether distribution of fluffy grounds was a concurrent part of the design for commercial establishments, since dosing there has to be consistent as well as quick and easy? What components of a doser deal with static and clumping, etc.?

Again, I doubt it. Why would one or two pulls of the doser have an appreciable effect on distribution or clumping? It's more likely that 3rd wave baristas eventually found a way to use the doser to improve distribution (CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!), but this had nothing to do with the original design process.

drgary wrote:What components of a doser deal with static and clumping, etc.? My Super Jolly has a wire mesh at the chute that deals with static, but I don't know if that was the first anti-static device.

The doser deals with static by virtue of the fact that it's enclosed. I have never seen static problem on dosers, ever. Sure, sometimes they shoot some particles that cling around the chute, especially when starting with an empty chute, but no grinder maker cares about this in the slightest. These grinders are almost universally designed to be used with the doser quite full, most of the nice ones actually automatically keep it full. when used like this, the static charge in the grinds is effectively neutralized just by the grinds sitting there.

It's doserless grinders that have static nightmares if not designed properly.

another_jim wrote:It would be interesting to know if Folger's tasted more or less dreadful when fresh. My guess is more dreadful, since they stopped selling fresh coffee a long time ago, and have every incentive to use coffees that are so bad, they actually improve when ground and canned.

Folgers is still available in whole beans, both in their office supply line and in their "gourmet" line. I have no clue how fresh it is.

David R.