Advisory

If I choose the ground option, when is it actually ground?

ALS-COFFEE-1.2-GRINDDATE-001

This question is worth asking but is not reducible to a check a page can settle. It is published as guidance, not as a test.

Assertion

grind_timing is_stated true

Applicability

applies when
the page offers a ground option
signal
a purchasable ground or brew-specific grind option exists

Accepted evidence

  • product_description — a statement of when grinding occurs relative to order and dispatch, together with a freshness window stated for the ground state

Explicitly insufficient evidence

What does not count, and why. Published because the omission is where a check quietly becomes a claim.

  • a grind dropdown with no statement of when grinding happens
    The commonest shape, and it silently inherits whatever freshness copy was written for whole bean.
  • "ground fresh to order"
    In practice this usually means ground at pack time within the same batch, so the roast date is unchanged while the freshness clock is roughly halved, and the page almost never says so.
  • the whole-bean freshness window quoted where the selected variant is ground
    The two states have materially different windows, so the figure is wrong for the offer being bought.
  • the roast date offered as the answer
    A bag ground on day one and one ground on day twenty share a roast date and are not equivalent products.
  • a grind named only by brew method
    Grind size drives the degassing rate, and method names do not pin a particle size.

Conflict rules

  • When the page sells a ground option and states only a whole-bean window — then record the undifferentiated window as the finding; the readable grind option is what makes this check possible at all

Discrimination

Authored expectation: no prediction, confidence low. The numeric band this standard used to carry is not published at this grammar version.

Grind timing is essentially never stated, so this would fail for almost every page offering a ground option. It is published because the asymmetry it exposes is genuinely useful: the grind option is machine-readable while the grind date is not, which converts an unreadable question into a readable structural check.

The numeric fail-rate band this reasoning was authored with is NOT carried at grammar 1.2 and is not reproduced here. Authored bands held 1 of 10 against this category's own sample and every miss was HIGH, so a direction derived from the band would inherit the error that condemned it (SCHEMA.md §9.3 step 3). The band survives in ALS-COFFEE v1.1 (standard_hash f8ec2780f60c38931913e5b6cd37506500c8462709209de7180ba6691d6137e7), which is byte-frozen and still served.

For a shopper

Ground coffee stales faster than beans, so when it was ground matters as much as when it was roasted. Ground fresh to order usually means ground when the bag was packed rather than when you ordered.

For a merchant

State when grinding happens relative to dispatch, and give a freshness window for the ground state rather than reusing the whole-bean figure.

Grounding