Coffee Storage: dos and donts
Proper coffee storage is critical for maintaining good flavor and keeping the coffee from going stale too quickly. This is especially important if you buy pre-ground coffee or you grind larger amounts of coffee that you intend to use over a course of time.
Ideally, the best way to enjoy coffee is when it is freshly ground just before using. A lot of people, even “coffee people” don’t realize how quickly ground coffee begins to lose flavor. Typically a properly stored whole bean coffee will start to lose flavor after about 4-6 weeks. Ground coffee, even properly stored, will start to lose flavor after 15-30 minutes. So, if you think about it, if you buy a bag of pre-ground coffee at a store, it’s likely that it’s been losing flavor for a month already. Sure it still tastes like coffee, but that coffee could have been exceptional when it was in whole bean form and freshly ground. I will be getting into essential and non-essential coffee tools in another post but a decent grinder is at the top of that list.
But this isn’t a post about grinders. This is a post about coffee storage. What is proper coffee storage and why does it matter? Proper coffee storage involves 2 things. 1) letting built up carbon dioxide escape, and 2) keeping out oxygen. While oxygen in necessary for human life, it is the villain of roasted coffee as it is what causes and accelerates the staling process. So that being said, proper coffee storage devices does both of those things.
Most specialty coffee bags have two things to help mitigate oxygen infiltration: one way Co2 release valves and ziploc style seals. When you close the bag after taking out the coffee you’re using, you can push out most of the oxygen before finishing the seal. But many coffee bags, especially ones purchased at a grocery store, don’t have those zip seals. They will often have a bread bag style tab where you can roll the top of the bag and then fold the tabs over. Ever wonder why when you roll the top of one of those bags you don’t get resistance from the air trapped inside? Even if these bags have Co2 release valves, those tabs do very little to keep oxygen from getting into the bag. Combine this with buying pre-ground coffee and you have a bag of coffee that will lose flavor and stale very quickly.
So what coffee storage options are out there for the coffee that doesn’t come in a good bag or you just want a more convenient way to access your beans?
The option I recommend the most are vacuum sealing canisters and forced air canisters. The two brands of vacuum canisters that I recommend are either the Coffeevac or the Atmos from Fellow. They each use different methods of vacuum and have different price points, but both are effective tools.
The forced air canister that I recommend is called the Airscape.
Airscape canisters used a sealing press, much like a french press, to push out the dead air space above the coffee in the canister.
There is another thing you can do if you don’t think you’re going to get to a coffee quickly or you bought a large Costco-size bag. You can FREEZE it. There have been a handful of scientific studies that have shown that freezing coffee does not have a negative impact on the beans themselves. You can even grind the coffee from it’s frozen state if you don’t have time to let it come back to room temp. The only thing that MUST be considered when using this method is that you need to have a way to keep other odors from getting into the coffee. You can do this either by vacuum sealing the coffee using a foodsaver or you can store the coffee in a glass mason jar with a tight lid.