The roast date — and your first scan

Skip the poetry; find the date. Coffee is a fresh good with a curve: for the first several days after roasting it is still breathing out CO2, and that gas physically disrupts brewing — bubbles shove water away from the grounds and the cup extracts unevenly. Rest a filter coffee four to seven days and it settles into its peak, which holds for roughly three or four weeks before the aromatics quietly fade.

A bag printed only with 'best before' a year from now is telling on itself — that is a shelf-life promise, not a freshness claim, and it usually means the roast date would embarrass it. A printed roast date is the cheapest specialty signal there is.

Storage is simple: sealed, dark, cool, and not the fridge — a refrigerator is humid and full of odors that coffee happily absorbs. For a bag you will not touch for a month or more, the freezer genuinely works: airtight, in portions, and always thawed sealed so condensation forms on the bag, not the beans.

Now put the whole chapter to work. Open the scanner from the Beans tab and point it at any bag in your kitchen. Blend reads the label — origin, process, roast, notes, roast date — and files it to your shelf. Every line it captures is a line you now know how to read; the scan is this chapter, automated.