Turns out most "specialty" coffee roasters are just reheating old stock

I was digging into a roaster's website the other day and found a page where they admitted their beans sit in the warehouse for 6 to 8 months before hitting the roaster. That blew my mind because everyone talks about freshness like it's a religion. I checked three more roasters in Portland and two had similar vague notes about storage times. What do you all think, is there a difference between 'fresh roasted' and 'fresh crop' or are they just marketing tricks?

3 comments

3 Comments

david_rivera422d ago

My buddy Dave from Seattle called me last week pissed off about this exact thing. He dropped $60 on a bag from some hot new roaster, got it in the mail, and the roasted-on date was a month old but the harvest date was over 10 months back. He called the shop and the guy basically said "oh yeah those were green beans from last year, we just roasted them last week." So he paid premium money for year-old coffee that the roaster bought cheap and sat on. He said it tasted flat and dusty no matter how he brewed it. That whole "fresh roasted" thing feels like a shell game now, you're paying for the roast date but the real clock started ticking way before that.

valw3622d ago

Right, because day-old toast is totally the same as fresh bread...

elizabeth90022d agoMost Upvoted

Wait, doesnt the harvest date tell you way more than the roast date though? Like everyone obsesses over "roasted 3 days ago" but nobody asks when the beans were actually picked. That whole thing with your friend Dave just proves the system is broken. Roasters are straight up buying cheap old green beans, roasting them fresh, and charging top dollar while the flavor is already shot. They bank on people not knowing the difference between a bean that was picked last month vs last year. And the worst part is most coffee drinkers cant even tell because theyve never had truly fresh harvest coffee to compare it to. Feels like the whole specialty coffee industry is built on that trick.