Fordo journal
4 min read · July 17, 2026
A best-by date tells you when a bag of coffee is still legal to sell. It says nothing about when the coffee tastes good. Roasted coffee is not milk; it does not spoil in a way that hurts you. It fades. Aromatics leave, oils oxidize, and a cup that tasted like pear and sugarcane in week two tastes like generic brown in week ten.
So ignore the best-by and read the roast date. On every Fordo bag that date is recent, because we roast weekly on our Giesen W6A and batch to what has been ordered, not to what a warehouse can hold. A bag that reaches you days after roasting gives you the whole flavor window, not the tail end of it.
Roasting builds up CO2 inside the bean, and for the first days after roast that gas is still escaping. Brew too early and the CO2 gets in the way of extraction: the bloom foams like soda and the cup tastes hollow and sharp. This settling period is called degassing, and it is why a two-day-old bag can taste worse than a two-week-old one.
Our house guidance: rest filter coffee 4 to 7 days off roast, and espresso 7 to 14, since espresso is far less forgiving of trapped gas. After that, most coffees hold well for about a month, then slide gently. None of this is exotic. It is standard specialty practice, and it is the reason the roast date matters more than any other number on the pack.
Coffee's enemies are oxygen, moisture, heat, and light, roughly in that order. The sealed pack your coffee arrives in is built against all four, which makes it better storage than almost anything on your shelf. Keep the coffee in it. Squeeze the air out after each dose, close it properly, and keep the bag somewhere cool and dark.
The one move that feels right but isn't: decanting into a clear glass jar on the counter. It looks great, and it bathes the beans in light and a jar full of oxygen. If you want a canister, make it opaque and airtight, and still keep it out of the sun and away from the stove.
Freezing coffee is not a myth. Done properly, it is the best long-term storage there is, and plenty of competition baristas freeze their best lots. The failure mode is condensation: take a bag out, open it cold, put it back, and every cycle pulls moisture onto the beans.
The fine print, then: freeze only in a truly airtight container, ideally split into single doses, and once a portion comes out it stays out. Let it reach room temperature before opening. If you cannot commit to that, the cupboard is the safer bet.
The cheapest upgrade to your home coffee is buying cadence. A 1kg bag looks economical, but if it takes you two months to finish, the last 500g pays for the discount with flavor. Rough math: at a cup a day you go through about 15g, so 100g is a focused week and 250g is two to three good weeks — both inside the flavor window.
Our advice: buy what you drink in three to four weeks and let our weekly roast schedule be your stock room. Save the 1kg bags for offices and high-traffic machines. And if you rotate coffees slowly, drip bags are this logic taken to its end: each serving sealed on its own, fresh until you tear it open.