Buying coffee: how much, how often

Coffee is perishable, roasters offer discounts on volume, and those two facts conflict.

Working out your consumption

Start with grams per day.

A pour over uses fifteen to eighteen grams. A double espresso uses eighteen to twenty. A French press for two uses thirty.

Two pour overs a day is roughly thirty-two grams, or about two hundred twenty-five grams a week.

Which means a two hundred fifty gram bag lasts about a week, and a kilogram lasts about a month.

Do this arithmetic once. It changes how you buy.

The freshness window

Coffee is generally best between roughly five days and five weeks after roasting.

Which means the practical rule is to buy what you will drink within about four weeks, and to have it arrive fresh.

Someone drinking two hundred twenty-five grams a week should buy either a kilogram monthly or two hundred fifty grams weekly, and the second gives fresher coffee at higher cost per gram.

The bulk trap

A kilogram at a discount looks sensible and frequently is not.

If it takes you eight weeks to drink it, the last half is past its best.

Two mitigations.

Split it on arrival into portions and freeze all but the current one, in genuinely airtight containers, opening each only when needed.

Properly done, this preserves coffee far better than leaving it in a bag on the counter.

Share it. Splitting a kilogram with someone gets the volume discount without the staling.

Variety versus consistency

A genuine trade-off.

Buying the same coffee repeatedly means your grinder setting stays put, your recipe is dialled, and every cup is predictable.

For espresso in particular this is a substantial practical benefit, since re-dialling costs several shots.

Buying different coffees teaches you more, keeps it interesting, and means constant adjustment.

A workable compromise is a house coffee you buy regularly plus one exploratory bag at a time.

Subscriptions

Convenient and prone to accumulation.

Set the quantity and frequency from your actual consumption, not optimistically.

Choose one where pausing and skipping is easy, because life produces weeks where you drink less.

Prefer roasters who roast to order and ship immediately.

The most common subscription failure is a cupboard of half-finished bags, all past their best, which is worse value than buying one fresh bag at a time.

Timing an order

Order before you run out, not after.

Coffee ordered on the day the last bag empties means several days of no coffee or emergency supermarket beans.

Ordering with about a week left in the current bag means the new one arrives and rests while you finish.

That rest is useful — a bag arriving on day three after roasting is at its best around day seven to ten.

Reading the roast date on arrival

If coffee arrives more than two weeks after roasting, the roaster is shipping from stock rather than roasting to order.

Not necessarily a problem for filter coffee, and worth knowing.

Consistently receiving month-old coffee is a reason to change supplier.

What to do with coffee you do not like

It happens, and throwing it away is wasteful.

Try a different method. A coffee that is unpleasant as pour over may be good in a French press or as cold brew.

Try a different recipe. Coarser, cooler, shorter, or a wider ratio.

Use it for milk drinks, where milk covers a great deal.

Make cold brew, which is the most forgiving method and works with coffee that has faded.

Cook with it. Ground coffee in a spice rub for meat or in chocolate baking is genuinely good.

Tell the roaster, if it seems defective rather than simply not to your taste. Good ones want to know.

Storage once you have it

Covered elsewhere, and in summary: airtight, opaque, room temperature, away from heat and light, whole beans, ground fresh.

The original valve bag rolled and clipped works well.

Freeze in portions anything you will not drink within a month.

A workable routine

Calculate your weekly consumption.

Buy a quantity that lasts three to four weeks.

Order when a week remains.

Keep one house coffee and one exploratory bag.

Freeze anything that will outlast the window.

And check the roast date on arrival every time, because that is the only way you find out whether a supplier is actually doing what they claim.