Most people have never had fresh coffee.

I will tell you why and what steps you can take to enjoy a tasty coffee beverage for perhaps the first time.

Even with the huge popularity of coffee in our daily lives, people still consider the high priced cup of Java they buy at high end retail chains like Starbucks to be the best source for a top shelf cup of joe. What they don’t know, is that many coffee chains use beans up to 6 months after roasting and in fact, over roast the beans to achieve a more consistent taste (albeit burnt) throughout this fresh to stale to extremely stale period.

Any time you walk into a coffee chain store, you can either receive a brewed cup with burnt beans that are fresh, or more likely, a brewed cup with burnt beans that is stale. The goal is to give the customer a consistent experience without having to roast daily in over 22,000 stores worldwide.

They key to freshness in coffee is the rule of 15’s:

1. Green (un-roasted) coffee beans are fresh for 15 months.
2. Roasted coffee beans are fresh for 15 days.
3. Ground coffee beans are fresh for 15 minutes.

So how do you enjoy fresh coffee daily?

I recommend living next door to a coffee roaster. Places like Whole Foods sell fresh roasted coffee displayed in huge bins and provide roast day information. Secondly, you can have fresh roasted coffee delivered to your door periodically if you don’t mind paying the shipping costs. But the most economic and fun way is to buy greens and roast at home! It’s not as hard as you think and I will show you how in Part 2.