At Wow Coffee Beans, our products are not sitting on a retail shelf so a puffed up bag is less of a concern – it actually helps protect the contents during shipping. We also have to keep a large portfolio of coffees from constantly running out of stock……every day we run short on at least 30 – 40% of our portfolio as we roast only enough for 24hrs in blends and 48hrs in single origins. Typically, Monday afternoon we literally have nothing left from the roasting that morning. Sometimes, we run out of certain roasted coffees in just hours when a group of customers place orders for the same coffees in a short timeframe. Our daily routine tops up approx. 20+ different coffees in a never ending cycle to keep it always fresh. Our products need to move so quickly we don’t have the luxury of allowing roasted coffee to sit in tubs for days – we need to ship immediately because customers tend to place orders when they have already run out.
We roast and pack within an hour….that is, the coffee is not allowed the opportunity to de-gas or develop. Whilst it’s not an ideal situation, it’s the safest and most reliable method to ensure peak freshness for the end-customer. With roasted coffee too fresh leaving our warehouse, it can lack full flavour, sweetness and body as it’s not yet developed – but don’t worry, it’s will occur.
In this “too fresh” state, the roasted coffee may have a slightly woody note because still very gassy – there is way too much CO2 in the espresso extraction and this affects flavor. Coffee that is too fresh also needs a much coarser grind which results in less flavor, body and sweetness being released due to limited contact time from espresso and large ground particle size. You may notice that when you open a fresh pack of roasted coffee beans, it may also partially “choke” your espresso machine due to the static/clump grounds.
There is no easy way to deal with this imperfect balancing act, so it’s always safer for us to ensure it’s too fresh and utilize the buffer created by freight transit times to aid development of the roasted coffee. The objective being that customers receive coffee still a bit too fresh and experience that unique peak/optimal usage window.
You can’t get that same result from a supermarket or most retail stores due to uncontrolled or unmanaged inventory turns that are measured in weeks and months, versus our Wow Coffee approach of hours and days.
The challenge of course exists for those customers in that use Express freight – receiving coffee that is barely 24hrs and maybe not even 48hrs off the roaster – it’s yet to develop.
