Do you think its important that the roast dates are printed on the coffee bags? I usually stick to bags that are within 3 days of roast and go through it within 10 days or so. However, I recently visited a roaster in san Diego and none of their 100+ bags were marked with dates - wondering if it doesn't matter any more or if they are just being lazy.

I won't buy if there's no date.

Further, who's to say the printed roast date on the bag...is truth?

CamBam_HB wrote:I usually stick to bags that are within 3 days of roast

I envy you. I'm in one of the fly-by states and it's rare to see bag of coffee beans with roast date shown and even if they do, 3 days old roast is extremely rare.

mkane wrote:I won't buy if there's no date.

+1

spressomon wrote:Further, who's to say the printed roast date on the bag...is truth?

Perhaps, but most of the roasters that I buy from, it seems on the up and up.
One of the smaller roasters that I frequent, they roast in small batches so generally nothing is more than a few days old.
A larger local roaster, they swap out their stock every Wednesday afternoon at the shops and the dates seems to support that.

Now, the bags at large retailers like Target or Whole foods, the best i've seen is 2 weeks post roast, however these tend to languish and i've seen as old as 2 months on some of the bags that are available.

spressomon wrote:Further, who's to say the printed roast date on the bag...is truth?

I noticed with my local roaster that all my orders come with a roast date on the bag that is the same as my order day. Frankly, I don't think it's the truth and they ship right off the roasting machine. They must have some inventory that was roasted at least a few days before I ordered it. So I suspect that they roast beforehand and bag it, but only put a stamp when they ship. So there is no way to tell how old is the roast. I can tell the beans are relatively fresh, this is why I keep ordering from them. But I never tired coffee that was guaranteed 1-day roast, so I have no point of reference. Still, something tells me that I would be able to tell if the beans were just roasted a day ago. Personally, I think that many small batch roasters, if not all, use the same trick to keep their cost down.

mkane wrote:I won't buy if there's no date.

+1 on that

VoidedTea wrote:I noticed with my local roaster that all my orders come with a roast date on the bag that is the same as my order day. Frankly, I don't think it's the truth and they ship right off the roasting machine.

All the online roasters I can think of accept orders one day and roast/ship the next. For example, if I order on Sunday, it will be roasted/shipped Monday. They're doing this for efficiency, i.e., they don't want to roast what they might not sell. Of course, if they're selling in a retail store, then it would make sense to have some inventory rather than guess how much of coffee X, Y, and Z you'll sell on a given day.

jgood wrote:+1 on that

For inventory control, coffees sold in retail chains sometimes have coded dates. For example, Counter Culture Coffee is sold at WholeFoods and it has a coded roast date on the bottom because they have a "Sell By" agreement with the retailer.