What Is the Best Time to Drink a coffee from Fábrica?
The short answer: from about two weeks after the roast date, and for the five weeks that follow. The roast date on your bag tells you when the clock started, not how little time you have left — here is what to expect, week by week.
The roast date is a starting line, not a countdown
Every bag we pack carries two things: a lot number and the date its beans were roasted. Most people read that date as a deadline — the older it is, the worse the coffee must be.
With coffee from a conventional drum roaster that instinct is roughly right. It arrives loud, it peaks within a couple of weeks, and then it starts to slide. Our coffee behaves differently, because of the machine it comes out of: it takes a little longer to open up, and then it stays at its best for far longer.
So on our bags the roast date is less of a warning and more of a birthday. It tells you where the coffee is in its life, not how close it is to the end.
Week by week, what to expect
| Weeks after roasting | What is happening inside the bean | How it tastes |
|---|---|---|
| 0 – 2 | Waking up. The bean is still packed with the CO₂ it made during the roast, and that gas gets in the way of the aroma. | Bright and a little tight. Good coffee already, and noticeably different from one week to the next. |
| 2 – 7 | At its peak. Enough gas has worked its way out for the aromas to come forward, and the bean has not yet given much away. | Rounded, sweet, at its most complete. This is the window we roast for. |
| 7 and beyond | Fading, slowly. | Still lovely — quieter and softer rather than stale. |
There is nothing to wait for and nothing to ration. The point of a long peak is that you cannot really get the timing wrong.
How that compares to other roasts
Two coffees roasted on the same day, on different machines, are not on the same clock:
| Ours, roasted on a Loring | A conventional drum roast | |
|---|---|---|
| Opening up | weeks 0 – 2 | the first week |
| At its peak | weeks 2 – 7 — about five weeks | weeks 1 – 3 — about two weeks |
| After that | fades slowly | fades sooner |
This is not a criticism of drum roasting. It is a different machine making a different trade: drum-roasted coffee is ready to drink sooner, and ours is at its best for longer. If you buy from several roasters, it is worth knowing which clock you are on.
How our roaster works
We roast on a Loring S35 Kestrel. Three things separate it from the drum roasters most coffee in the world comes out of, and all three end up in your cup weeks later.
It cooks with air, not metal. In a drum roaster the beans tumble against a hot steel wall and take their heat from the points of contact. In the Loring they are lifted and turned in a stream of very hot, very clean air, so the heat arrives from every side at once. The bean cooks evenly all the way to its core, without the small scorched patches that contact roasting leaves behind.
It runs in a closed loop. A single burner does two jobs: it heats the air that roasts the coffee, and it burns the smoke and chaff coming off the beans. That air is then sent back round and used again. Most of the heat is reused instead of going up a chimney, which is also why the machine burns a fraction of the gas a drum roaster with a separate afterburner needs.
There is almost no oxygen in there. The air passing the beans is largely spent combustion gas, so there is very little oxygen for the coffee to react with while it is roasting. Oxidation is what eventually turns coffee flat — and inside a Loring most of it never gets started.
Put together, the bean that comes out is simply less damaged: fewer cracks, less porous, more of its cell structure intact. A bean like that holds on to its CO₂, and as long as the CO₂ is locked inside, so are the aromatic oils it is protecting. Staling is mostly oxygen getting in and aroma getting out; a tighter bean slows down both.
What we are honest about
The same density that keeps our coffee good for longer also makes it slower to start. A bag that is three days old is not yet showing you everything it can do — the gas has to find its way out first. If you have only ever drunk drum-roasted coffee, our first few days can read as closed, or a touch sharp.
Give it a week or two and it opens up. That is the whole reason the peak in the table above starts at week two rather than on day one.
Getting the most out of your bag
- Keep the bag sealed, somewhere cool and dark. A cupboard is ideal. Not the fridge, not a shelf above the stove, not direct sun.
- Grind just before you brew. Ground coffee has hundreds of times more surface area than whole beans and goes flat in days rather than weeks. This one habit matters more than everything else on this list put together.
- Adjust your grind as the weeks pass. A young, gassy coffee brews faster; the same coffee a month later will want a slightly finer grind or a little more time.
- Taste it more than once. The same bag at week one and at week four is genuinely two different cups. That is a feature, not a fault.
Common questions
Does the roast date mean my coffee expires?
No. The date says when the beans were roasted, so it tells you where the coffee is in its life. Coffee does not spoil the way milk does — it gradually loses aroma. Ours loses it slowly, and is at its most complete somewhere between two and seven weeks after that date.
Should I wait before opening the bag?
You do not have to. Brew it the day it arrives — that cup is worth having, and it teaches you what the coffee tastes like young. Then come back to the same bag two weeks later and compare.
Is a coffee roasted last week better than one roasted a month ago?
Usually the opposite, with our coffee. A month-old bag is likely to be sitting right in its peak, while a week-old bag is still opening up.
Why does the bag have a lot number as well as a date?
The lot number identifies the exact roast the bag was filled from, which is how we can trace any bag back to its batch and its green coffee. The date on the bag is derived from that lot number, so the two can never disagree.
