If you visit our London sales office, you will be offered a cup of coffee. It’s not just any coffee, but we get it from Peet’s, the Berkeley, California based coffee roaster. We think it is the best coffee in the world. It’s a long trip from Berkley to London and when the beans arrive they taste great, but we notice that the beans decline in flavor over just a few weeks. So, to keep them fresh, we freeze them usually. We’ve been told that is not the thing to do, but seems to work pretty well for us. But still, once they are defrosted they do start to lose their flavor pretty rapidly. Being atuned to the taste of the things we drink, we notice the changes and it appears that as in wine, freshness does matter with coffee beans.

That is why when I read the spin on The Coffee Fool, I thought, well there is good information that everyone who cares about coffee should know-

On the site, they say:

“Nearly all of the coffee out there is stale. The good news is that stale coffee is drinkable if you’ve never had truly fresh coffee. The bad news is that once you’ve tasted truly fresh coffee, you’ll be forever hooked. It will make you giddy every time you go to make a pot. Tingle right down to your toes. Reverberate around your head like a funky aura. That’s because coffee, just a few days out of the roaster, is nature’s most flavorful drink – more complex than even wine – containing well over 900 flavor compounds to dance on your taste buds. But after a few weeks, you’d be lucky to see half that number.

These guys comments on coffee are more or less precisely what we have been saying about wine and is why we created a freshness indicator for our wines. Until you taste fresh, you won’t know what you are missing.

Now, we’ve not tried the coffee, and we maintain our skepticism, but we think we’ll give it a go the next time we need to order.

BTW, as long as we are on the subject of keeping things fresh, if anyone is interested in knowing a fail safe way of preserving an open bottle of wine indefinitely and with no fancy gizmos, just let us know and we’ll share the trade secret.