> freshly ground coffee

This is actually the single most determining factor for a good coffee.

No, it isn't. Freshly roasted is.

The aroma and flavor of coffee degrades rapidly after roasting, whether you grind it or not. Grinding it accelerates the process, but you can easily get coffee in unground form, and the difference between ground and unground is visually obviously: a vendor can't sneak you ground coffee if you want unground.

How long ago beans were roasted isn't visually obvious.

No, again ;-). Its freshly roasted, freshly ground, AND freshly brewed (at the right parameters). That's the gist of it, but of course the quality of the greens before roasting, the roast quality, and grind consistency all come into play. Also don't forget to use good water.

In short: quality in, quality out. Any discrepancy of the above will lead to a sub-par result.

But freshly ground and freshly brewed is something you easily control as the consumer, which makes them taken for granted and irrelevant. The other parameters are the object of the coffee drinker's desperate search. :)

Sub-optimal perhaps. I think sub-par is optimistic about the average cup of coffee.

Yea personally I find freshly ground makes a massive difference. In fact I was just going to ask how they keep beans fresh in those pods...

Even when buying whole beans though it only lasts a week max before I can start to taste a big difference. You can usually tell as gasses are no longer released when pouring hot water over the freshly ground beans.

Freeze them they'll stay fresh.

Well this does work. Storing your ground coffee in a sealed container in the freezer is the single easiest thing you can do to improve the flavour of your coffee.

Store-bought ground coffee was roasted months and months ago, so you must be "freshly" grinding beans that were also roasted months and months ago, if you're finding the results similar.

Ideally you want coffee to have been roasted no more than about three weeks ago.

Flavor and taste are fundamentally linked, so if something smells better, it's pretty much the same thing as tasting better.

That's not a given, though. Take some French cheeses which stink unbelievably bad yet have a smooth, creamy & almost sweet taste. The disconnect can be quite surprising. I'm told that Durian fruit can be similar but I have not encountered that monster… yet. :)

When you decide to try Durian, my recommendation is to freeze it. When you take it out of the freezer to eat it, it will be creamy and sweet while minimizing the odor.

Also fish sauces and pastes, fermented fish or soy products (chòu dòufu, nattō, …).