Does Coffee Expire?

Everyone likes their coffee a different way, and odds are you have your preferred method of brewing, not to mention your preferred source for beans. But no matter where you get your beans, odds are you’ll find a roasting date on the bag, and maybe even an expiry date. But does coffee really expire? The team here at Delevu thought we’d dig into our impressive collection of content to find you an answer.

So does coffee really expire? Not exactly, but its age will definitely affect its flavor profile. Coffee brewed many months after it’s been roasted will lose a lot of the flavor and complexity that may have made it your favorite, but that doesn’t mean it’s “gone bad.” That said, coffee shouldn’t be brewed too early either. Coffee that’s brewed too close to when it’s roasted could still contain CO2 and other chemicals from the roasting process, which could negatively impact the flavor.

So how do companies determine the “best before” dates? Here’s what Klaus Thomsen, co-owner of Danish roaster Coffee Collective had to say in an interview with Sprudge:

“When we started the company we did a series of experiments because we wanted to see what is freshness and how does it affect the actual quality of the cup,” says Thomsen. “We would store samples and take them out over time, and we were really interested in ‘what is the peak window of the coffee and how does it change?' We figured out that the degassing really does happen over quite a long time. It's very rapid in the beginning and then it slows down,” he continued. “We felt like for filter coffees it was best if we waited about a week, it would really peak, and we found that we actually had a really long window—you could wait two months and it would still taste fantastic,” says Thomsen. “After that you could still lose freshness, but if you ground fresh, we found that it's really nice up to about three months. After three months you are starting to lose quite a lot of freshness of flavor, so we didn't want retailers to have the bag and sell it on.”

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