How fresh should the coffee beans be?

This is a common question when I am at the espresso bar. Should the beans be straight out of the roaster? Are they better and brighter as soon as they roll out of the cooling tray? In this blog post, Black Market Roasters will take you through the ideal roast timing for your home use.

To cut out all the nerdy stuff, when green coffee (picked coffee that has been dried) is roasted, the beautiful acids, aromas, and cell structures burst back into life as the moisture content increases. The beans are suddenly alive again and many things change from the roasting drum to the bag, even if it is a matter of minutes!

Undergoing dramatic change inside the roaster, the heat allows the acids and sugars to convert in a way that is pleasing to our palate. If roasted properly, the beans will puff up just slightly and the aroma will be sweet and alluring. From this moment on, everything starts to change. If you were to drink the coffee right now, you would get a confusion of acids, grassy, tart flavours and it would not usually be good. It is for this reason, we let the coffee beans chill out in a sealed environment for a couple of days. This is the perfect time to send the coffee beans to you!

After about 4 days depending on the coffee, some of the nastier acids fall away, leaving origin specific flavours brightening the cup. For some coffees this can be too young still to consume coffee, so at Black Market Roasters we recommend our coffee beans to be consumed 5 days from roast. As everything mellows and the coffee sweetens, you will be able to enjoy the coffee for another 3-4 weeks. We recommend drinking within 2-3 weeks from roast date and you will smell the aroma fall way as the days roll on.

We are Black Market Roasters, a wholesale and retail coffee bean supplier based in Sydney, but deliver free to Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth, Canberra and Brisbane. We freshly roast Arabica single origin coffee beans, perfect for your breville coffee machine or other coffee maker. We roast many different types of coffee including decaffeinated coffee beans and as mentioned single origins from Colombia, Australia, Brasil plus more. Head over to our coffee beans page to buy a sample pack of freshly roasted coffee.