Roast date vs best before: what the dates on a coffee bag mean

Roast date vs best before: what each one actually means

A roast date is the day the coffee was roasted. Nothing more. It is a record of something that happened, so you can work out how old the bag in your hand is.

A best-before is a prediction. It is the packer's estimate of the last day the food will still be at its best, if it has been stored the way the label says. It is about quality, not safety. That is why coffee carries a best-before and not a use-by.

The two dates answer different questions. One is the age of the coffee. The other is somebody's opinion about how long it keeps. A bag can have eleven months left on its best-before and have been roasted a year ago, and nothing on the label would tell you.

Why so many coffee bags only show a best-before

Prepacked food sold in the UK has to carry a date of minimum durability. For roasted coffee that is a best-before. A roast date is not required, and no rule stops anyone printing one alongside it. It is a choice.

That is most of the explanation for supermarket coffee. A bag gets roasted, packed, palletised, shipped, warehoused, distributed and shelved, and the only date on it is the one the packer chose. The window can be long. Somewhere inside it sits a roast date you cannot see.

It is not a scandal. It is a labelling rule doing exactly what it was written to do, which was never to tell you the age of your coffee.

Watch for a third kind of date. “Packed on” is not a roast date. Coffee can be roasted, held in bulk and packed weeks later, and the packing date will still read as recent.

What happens to coffee after it's roasted

Roasting makes carbon dioxide and the bean holds on to it. Over the days after the roast, the gas works its way out. That is degassing. It is why so many bags have a small round one-way valve on the front, letting gas out without letting air in.

Very fresh coffee can be awkward to brew. In an espresso machine the shot can run unevenly, and the crema can look better than the cup tastes. It is common advice to rest beans for a few days before pulling espresso. For filter, cafetiere and anything going into a jug, the window is far more forgiving.

After that the change runs the other way. The aromatic compounds that make coffee smell like coffee are volatile, which means they leave. Oxygen gets at the oils. Nothing dramatic happens on any one day. The cup just gets quieter: less smell when you open the bag, less in the mouth.

It does not spoil the way fresh food spoils. It fades. That is why the label says best before rather than use by.

Whole bean or ground: how long each one holds up

Grinding multiplies the surface exposed to air. A whole bean is one small sealed parcel. Ground coffee is a heap of open faces. Same coffee, same bag, completely different rate of change.

The working conventions among roasters run roughly like this. Sealed and unopened, whole beans are at their best in the first few weeks after roasting and stay perfectly drinkable well past that. Ground coffee, sealed, holds a fraction of the same time. Once the bag is open, whole beans give you a couple of weeks of not thinking about it. Ground gives you days.

Those are conventions, not measurements. Nobody has tested your bag, your grinder, your water and your kettle. Write the date you opened it on the front with a biro. After two or three bags you will know more about how your coffee behaves than any chart can tell you.

If you have no grinder, that is not a problem to solve. Buy ground, buy less, finish it sooner. A bag you get through in a fortnight beats a big one you are still working down in March.

How to store coffee, and why not the fridge

Airtight, cool, dark, dry. That is the whole method. Air, heat, light and damp, in roughly that order of damage.

Grinding as you brew does more than any container will. If you have a grinder, grind what you are about to make and leave the rest whole. If you do not, none of this is wasted on you. The buying-less part is doing most of the work.

• Keep it in the bag it came in, rolled down and clipped, or in an airtight tin. The bag was designed for the job. A decanted jar with a loose lid is a downgrade.
• Put it in a cupboard, not on the worktop above the kettle. Steam and heat are what do the damage in a kitchen.
• Not the fridge. It is humid, it is full of smells, and every time the bag comes out and goes back, condensation forms on cold coffee.
• The freezer works for a bag you seal once and open once, months later. It does not work for the bag you dip into every morning, for the same condensation reason.
• Buy an amount you will actually finish. Most storage advice is a workaround for buying too much in the first place.

How to judge any bag of coffee before you buy it

This works in a supermarket, in a farm shop, on any roaster's website, and on ours.

None of that requires buying from us. If it sends you to a decent roaster ten minutes from your station, that is a better result than a bag posted across the country.

• Look for a roast date first. If there is one, the roaster has decided you are allowed to know how old it is. That decision tells you something before you have tasted anything.
• If there is only a best-before, you can work backwards, but you are guessing. Twelve months out could be a bag roasted last week or one roasted last spring.
• Check the date is labelled. A bare number printed on a bag tells you nothing about which date it is. Two dates, both labelled, is the standard to hold everyone to.
• Look for a one-way valve. It suggests the coffee went into the bag close to roasting, because coffee that finished degassing somewhere else has no need of one.
• On a website, look for the roast date or the roasting schedule stated before you pay, not just the words freshly roasted. There is no date behind that phrase, so there is nothing in it you can check.
• Email and ask. A small roaster will tell you the roast date, and how quickly and plainly they answer is worth knowing on its own.

What will be on ours, and what has not happened yet

Two dates will be on the front of every bag, both labelled: the roast date, and a best-before twelve months out. Labelled, because an unlabelled date is just a number and you should not have to guess which one it is.

Now the part that matters more than the label. Nothing is roasted yet. Every order is a pre-order: you pay when checkout opens, the green gets bought, and it gets roasted in a 250g pack designed to go through a letterbox. Cancel any time before it ships for a full refund, no reason needed.

Blue Light Blend and Graveyard Blend are both in the first roast, and the rest of the range follows. Whole bean or any grind, the same price, because we do not charge for grinding. The green will be bought through a UK importer and roasted in the UK in small batches. None of it is bought yet.

What goes into Blue Light Blend is not named on this page. The green is not bought, so the growing regions are not ours to state, and the promise on the front of the site is that origins get named when they are bought and not before. We have never been to a farm and we are not going to pretend we have. When the coffee is bought, this page gets rewritten and the old wording comes out rather than being quietly softened.

Every ten 250g bags sold sends 250g to a UK emergency services mess room. Forty bags sold sends a full kilo. It is a ratio, not a cap, so it keeps going past whatever we plan for. The counter is at zero bags to zero stations, as at 05/08/26, and stays there until the first bag ships. If you would rather not pay for coffee that has not been roasted, the list is free and the roast dates go out on it first.