Expired coffee, can it be drunk? This is a fairly common question. And I’m not sure why that is exactly, but I’m going to try and give you my best advice on expired coffee and when it can be enjoyed and when it is best to stay away from it. Now before we get into the nuts and bolts of drinking expired coffee, I want to add the caveat that I very seldom drink expired coffee and I advise you to do the same. To really get your Coffee Sensei 10th dan, you’ll need to stay away from musty and expired coffee beans as much as possible. However, the short answer to can you drink out of date coffee is yes. It’s a little more involved than that, but generally expired coffee beans are ok to drink.
However, sometimes it just can’t be helped, so in those instances, I hope that this information will be of use to you. I can’t honestly tell you what the coffee expiration date is as this isn’t a hard science. And the coffee best buy date or the coffee use by date that you find on the bag of coffee beans is the manufacturers estimate of how long coffee will stay at it’s peak flavor. So that really doesn’t tell you much.
Now personally, I have enjoyed expired coffee that was a year and a couple of days past the coffee expiry date on the bag. Now these were vacuum sealed bags and they were dark roasted coffee beans. They tasted fine. Not as good as fresh batch of roasted coffee, but you wouldn’t expect them to be would you? Now if you’re going to do this, make sure their is no mold or any other obvious signs of funkiness on the expired coffee. Now when it comes to expired ground coffee, I usually won’t drink expired ground coffee that is older than 3 or 4 months. But then again, you want to make sure that the coffee looks fine and living in a dry climate certainly lengthens the expiry date as compared to a moist climate.
Bottom line is to enjoy as freshly roasted coffee as you can and when ground, enjoy your coffee beans within a week is the best practice. This way you’ll never have to worry about expired coffee 🙂