Grind Your Own Coffee Beans
Why grind my own coffee beans?
Coffee beans have two types of "flavorful stuff" in them: tasty stuff and bitter stuff. Chemically speaking, most of the tasty stuff are volatile aromatic compounds. "Aromatic" means humans detect them by smell more strongly than by taste. "Volatile" means they naturally diffuse into the air at room temperature.
What does that mean?
That means that coffee beans get "stale" very quickly. Most of the tasty compounds naturally leech out of roasted coffee into the air the longer they sit. But, there's good news. Volatile compounds can only diffuse into the air where the surface of the coffee and the air touch. When roasted coffee is still in bean form, the comparatively small outside of the bean can gradually go stale, but the inside stays protected for much longer.
So, to get as much tasty stuff as possible out of the coffee and into your cup, keep the beans as fresh as possible. That means storing your coffee somewhere air-tight, dark, and room-temperature. And then, wait to grind the beans until right before you plan to brew them.