Keeping Ground Coffee Fresh

Hi guys,

Not exactly food, but more appropriate here than over in the wine side of things.

How do you keep your open ground coffee fresh? I know the best option is to get whole coffee beans and only grind what you need each brew/day. But if, like us, you buy pre-ground coffee, how do you keep it fresh once the pack's open?

At the moment, we commit the (seemingly) ultimate sin of keeping it in the fridge (the opened end rolled down and 'sealed' with a clothes peg!). We've never had a problem with 'fridge odours' infecting the coffee (not that we have many - if any - odours in our fridge), which appears to be the main reason given by most commentators for not storing it in the fridge.

And we don't see the benefits of storing the opened ground coffee in a 'air-tight' container, unless anyone knows of one that you can remove the air from once you've put the lid on!

So any comments or suggestions as to the best approach to take would be greatly appreciated!

Over to you.

Sharon, I freeze my coffee in a tightly sealed container. Whether whole bean or ground. And I try to keep the ground down to small amounts so there's not much of that, just leftovers from a big dinner party or such, which can be used quickly.

Never had a problem.

Which is good to hear, as I've also read that freezing ground coffee is supposed to not be good for it either. Our 'problem' ( ) is that we brew up a cafetiere pretty much every day. So if we did freeze the ground coffee once we've opened the pack, we'd have to defrost it the next day and then re-freeze it again, and freeze/re-freeze again and again each day.

I suppose we could divide the pack into individual cafetiere portions, and just defrost one a day. But that seems a lot of hassle!

Any easier options?

Sharon

Which is good to hear, as I've also read that freezing ground coffee is supposed to not be good for it either. Our 'problem' ( ) is that we brew up a cafetiere pretty much every day. So if we did freeze the ground coffee once we've opened the pack, we'd have to defrost it the next day and then re-freeze it again, and freeze/re-freeze again and again each day.

I suppose we could divide the pack into individual cafetiere portions, and just defrost one a day. But that seems a lot of hassle!

Any easier options?

Sharon

Stop drinking coffee?

Buy an incredibly expensive Gaggia that does it all at the touch of a button?

Stop worrying so much?

In my last life I spent about 15 years in the packaging industry and sold a lot of packaging machinery to coffee roasters. I, too, used to believe that keeping coffee frozen or cooled in the fridge was the best way to go. And, for what it's worth, I still keep my ground coffee in the fridge for lack of a better place to stow it. Old habits die hard. However ...

To a man, the coffee roasting folks I have worked with do not recommend refrigerated or frozen storage for either whole bean or ground coffee. The moisture which develops just sucks the life out of the coffee. It is, according to them, better just to keep the coffee in a dark, cool, dry spot. (So, what else is new?) If you refrigerate, the idea is to keep the moisture out!

Public Enemy Number 1 is air. As with wine, oxidation will make coffee go stale and it does it quickly. This is why coffee is vacuum packed and, at times, packaged in a modified atmosphere, i.e. an inert gas, such as nitrogen, is used to replace the oxygen in the package. So, just do what you can to keep the coffee away from the air.

For those who want really fresh coffee the cat's meow is the use of green beans. You need to roast and grind your own. Green coffee beans will last virtually forever if stored in a, uh, dark, cool, dry spot.

Prize Question: I'll record the answering machine greeting on the home answering machine of the first person who can explain why certain bags of coffee have a belly button (little hole) in them.

Agree with Hoke (1) and Hoke (2). There is no problem with going directly from the freezer to the pot. In our case it is directly to the filter in the cone in the carafe. If you think this is a slow way to make a lot of coffee, I used to run a B&B and made up to twelve carafes of coffee this way every day in no time at all.

The navel seems to be a one-way valve so that air can be drawn out. Does that get me a greeting in your mellifluous voice, preferably in early High German?

The navel is to flush the bag with nitrogen.

The navel seems to be a one-way valve so that air can be drawn out. Does that get me a greeting in your mellifluous voice, preferably in early High German?

Close enough ... although I would have expected more precision from a ersatzcorkogolist who's made it all the way to the 10th grade!

It's not air, at least not all of it. It's roasting gases which must escape the otherwise sealed bag. Without the one-way valve a tightly sealed bag of warm, freshly roasted and immediately packed coffee would inflate and explode in most instances. Cans don't have this problem.

Whole beans have the most gas trapped in their internal nooks and crannies. Ground coffee has the least because a lot of the gas escapes during grinding.

Many companies "cure" their freshly roasted coffee between 48 and 72 hours before packaging to allow the roasting gases to dissipate. In other words, they let it sit around in open bins and pass gas which makes the valve unnecessary. Such coffee is already teenager before it leaves the roasting plant so it pays to look for packages with valves on them, especially whole bean coffee, since they were probably packaged soon after roasting.

I think Peet's put a "born on" date on their bags to cue you to when the coffee was roasted.

In many South American countries the roasters simply poke a hole in the bag. Of course, this lets air in, but they don't expect the package's shelf life to go much beyond a week.

I'll see if I can find out how to say Stud Muffin in Althochdeutsch.

The navel is to flush the bag with nitrogen.

No. Usually the coffee is filled from a dosing device through some kind of tube into a bag. Nitrogen is introduced at some point in the process, e.g. into the dosing unit above the tube or into the bagmaker's tube itself, to replace the oxygen and create a nitrogen atmosphere. Ideally, a column of nitrogen is created starting at the empty bag, reaching up through the filling tube, and ending in the hopper of the dosing device.

I guess I've found another topic for the "What I Can Bore You With" thread!

Since there are two of us, we buy our coffee in small bags, keep it in a cool, dry, dark place, sealed tight. Great coffee everyday, no problems.
Sometimes we grind, when traveling in our RV, we use ground.

I heard from a friend in the coffee business that keeping coffee in the freezer, especially ground coffee, can dry out the coffee. As you may have witnessed, 'freezer burn' as it is often called affects meats by pulling moisture out and leaving a white patch of dry meat. The very same thing can happen to coffee, ground or not. For this reason, I keep mine in the fridge only. The worst thing is to leave it on the counter.
However, if you go through coffee quickly, keeping it in the freezer may not be too bad. I certainly would not store it for months there.

That's what I'd read, Jon, about keeping coffee in the freezer. And our attempts at freezing our home-grown vegetables (when we've had a glut) have given us first hand experience of the detrimental effects of freezing on moisture content. So freezing wasn't an option we saw as a goer (along with the other reasons given before about using the ground coffee too regularly).

Unfortunately, we can only seem to get ground coffee in supermarkets over here in 227g bags. Whilst we do drink a fair bit, we don't go through quite that much that quickly (still takes about a week to two weeks)! So Karen's suggestion is out unless we start buying more expensive, speciality coffees (which we could, but we've found a fair trade ground coffee and a decaf ground coffee which when combined 50/50, really hits the mark for us ).

The ground coffee we buy recommends keeping it in the fridge and using it within two weeks, so I think we'll probably stick to that until we decide to get adventurous and buy our own grinder!

I've also read that freezing ground coffee is supposed to not be good for it either.

That's the way with much advice about food. Like whether to wash mushrooms (with rarely any details on why, and those often speculation -- actually there are good simple reasons to wash or not wash depending on what you use them for). But back to coffee.

Here's some practical experience, and some scientific basis.

For 30 years I experimented with coffee storage and by far the best way I found to slow changes in it -- for the quantity I wanted to store, rather than use soon -- was wrap it tightly (excluding all possible air) and impermeably (two layers of quality zip-lock freezer bags on top of whatever nominal sealing bag it usually came in from the roaster), then freeze it hard. No "moisture" whatever then enters to affect the coffee in the long term, and little or no gas exchanges (air in or volatile oils out). Whole beans, it's true, are slower to change than ground beans with this treatment, or I think any treatment, because they are not broken up with their contents exposed. I've kept occasional buys of rare or unusual coffee beans for 2-3 years this way and still had remarkably pleasing brews from them.

A little science. (This ought by rights to be in McGee's book, but I don't know). A couple of different mechanisms degrade flavor in aromatic natural foods (not limited to coffee). One is reactions with ambient gasses (especially oxygen), another is loss of "volatile oils." Classic literature on plant chemistry stresses "fixed vs. volatile oils" -- the language is liberal by chemists' standards (many aren't strictly oils but esters, aldehydes, terpenes, etc.) "Volatile oils" can evaporate, be distilled, etc., and they are important to aromas and flavors. They are why brewed coffee smells good.

The detailed flavor-impairment mechanisms may have little in common with each other, except that they all tend to slow when temperature falls. That is why any time you want to slow a reaction (whether flavor changes in a partial bottle of wine, or butter going rancid, which is oxidation) you seal up the product as well as you can and chill it down.

Max, McGee has a long essay on coffee, including a fascinating piece on roasting your own coffee. On the storage front, he is a bit abrupt:

Once roasted, whole coffee beans keep reasonably well for a couple of weeks at room temperature, or a couple of months in the freezer, before becoming noticeably stale. One reason that whole beans keep as long as they do is that they're filled with carbon dioxide, which helps exclude oxygen from the porous interior. Once the beans have been ground, room temperature shelf life is only a few days.

The rest of his article is filled with the science of how the roast works, and how to brew coffee.

Sharon, I've been thinking about going to a 50/50 decaf blend myself. Are you using anything we might find over here?

Hi Jon,

Due a couple of boring health problems, I tend to climb the walls and ceilings on full caf. coffee, and am rather ill on expresso, so the 50/50 blend is the way for us.

We've tried pretty much most of the different ground coffee producers found in our main supermarkets over here, and a range of the coffee styles / geographical coffee locations that they supply. And we always come back to Taylors of Harrogate.

We blend their Fairtrade Organic (Medium Roast 3) with their Decaffe (Rich Roast 4). Taylors also own a subsidiary company that just does decaf coffee, but we've not found that anywhere near as good as their Decaffe.

Their website is http://www.taylorscoffee.co.uk.

Bob, after mentioning it I too checked McGee's book (about which more in This Posting). His comments on coffee storage, and those of some other authors, regrettably omit to examine details like how the coffee is packaged for storage. That's even more true unfortunately of the discussion of refrigeration and freezing in Davids's standard and popular book Coffee (originally 1976; my copies are the 1987 paperback, ISBN 0892862750). Compared with their detailed treatments of history, roasting, and extraction, it's as if these authors complacently based all their storage advice on a single, perhaps familiar, packaging method. In contrast, by carefully excluding gas and moisture exchange and trapped air and therefore the ambient-gasses effects, I've extended McGee's "two or three months," to noticeable staleness for whole roasted beans, by an order of magnitude, to two or three years (to some flavor loss which might count as "staleness").

My son will be studing in London all of January. Perhaps he can bring some Taylors of Harrogate Fairtrade Organic and Decaffe back for me.
JP

My son will be studing in London all of January. Perhaps he can bring some Taylors of Harrogate Fairtrade Organic and Decaffe back for me.
JP

Certainly should be able to (unless there are restrictions on what food goods can be taken into the US?). If he's in London then I'd suggest checking out any branch of Waitrose, which should have both.

If he has any problems finding them, let me know.

Keeping ground coffee?

Freeze it.


But the better answer is to grind your own beans.

They ain't nothin' like a fresh brewed pot of coffee from freshly ground beans.


The aroma is to die for.

Keeping ground coffee?

Freeze it.


But the better answer is to grind your own beans.

They ain't nothin' like a fresh brewed pot of coffee from freshly ground beans.


The aroma is to die for.

There is one thing better: roast your own beans and then freshly grind them, which adds about another ten minutes. Yum.

Plus the "green" beans store indefinitely without going rancid.

There is one thing better: roast your own beans and then freshly grind them, which adds about another ten minutes. Yum.
Plus the "green" beans store indefinitely without going rancid.

Seconding both points (the second is less well known). My parents used to roast, as did a co-worker who was both Dutch (therefore requiring his coffee twice a day on the minute, a feature of business meetings there) and a food fanatic. I am not patient enough to do it and also we're spoiled here by two superb independent roasting coffee houses within easy walk (one of which direct-imports from its own sources). One of which posts versions of a popular bumper sticker* from various independent coffee houses.


*"Friends don't let friends go to St*rb*cks."