I've been pan roasting coffee at work since I run a hotel kitchen I'll roast coffee in a pan when I have some time. Its nice because of the high-btu stove and the commercial ventilation. I can roast a lb. at a time. Pan roasting is usually the hardest and worst way to roast coffee but I've become quite good at it. I even won a prize in a home roasting contest with one of my roasts back in March. It was a medium roast ethiopian blend. This method is very economical for me since I usually buy 6-8 lbs of green coffee at a time from Sweet Maria's.
The green beans store alot better than roasted coffee. I was reading that George Howell stores all of his green coffee in a deep freeze and that it preserves the freshness for even longer, but I don't know how long, but I've heard he has excellent results.
One thing that is overlooked with coffee roasting, and even Tom at Sweet Maria's makes this claim, which I don't agree with, that coffee is best 4-24 hours after roasting and fresh for only 5 days. Coffee is flat tasting until a few days after roasting, and then develops over a couple weeks and the flavor improves and changes, and then at some point the coffee starts to decline. Its due to the CO2 off-gassing that occurs, which at first is very heavy, and seems to taper off over a couple weeks. Its pretty cool actually, if you store your fresh roasted coffee in a sealed mason jar, you have to burp the lid to release the pressure and its makes a thump. You can tell when the off gassing is done because it won't build pressure in the jar any more after days.
Also you can store fresh roasted coffee in the freezer and it works great and allows you more flexibility in maintaining coffee freshness since you can roast alot at once and then not feel that you have to drink it all before it starts to go stale. Degassing is supposedly slowed in the freezer. Either way I have been freezing coffee and it tastes just as good after a month in the freezer as the fresh stuff. In fact, better sometimes because you know the coffee is fully degassed. Most roasters over on places like Home-barista forum don't touch the coffee for at least 2 days because the flavor won't be good until then. My theory is that the co2 emanating from the ground coffee interferes with the ability of the water to extract coffee solubles effectively during brewing.