Buying beans like you mean it

Turn the bag over and look for one thing: a roast date. Not a best-before date, which tells you when the coffee becomes undrinkable, but a roast date, which tells you when it was alive. Coffee peaks between one and four weeks after roasting, then fades — gradually, then entirely. Most supermarket bags carry no roast date because the answer is embarrassing. This single habit, checking the date, quietly sorts the whole market for you: roasters who print it are proud of it.

The rest follows from respecting that clock. Buy small bags, 250 grams, and buy them often, rather than the kilo bag that is stale for its second half. Buy whole beans, always, because grinding starts a faster clock measured in minutes. And buy single origins at least sometimes — not for connoisseurship, but because a coffee from one farm in one valley tastes like somewhere, and blends are engineered to taste like nowhere in particular. A washed Ethiopian and a natural Brazilian, brewed identically, are different drinks. That discovery costs one bag.

The economics are gentler than they look. A €14 bag makes about twenty cups — seventy cents each, against €4 at the counter. What actually changes is the relationship. Buying from a roaster who dates their work, in quantities you finish while they are good, makes you a participant in the coffee rather than a consumer of it. Small bags, bought often, from someone with a name. It is how everyone bought food once, and coffee still rewards it.