8 tips on how to store coffee and keep coffee fresh

Everybody wants their coffee to taste good, but not everyone knows the correct way to store coffee beans and keep coffee fresh. It is difficult to stress enough how important the effect of good or poor storage can be upon the taste of your brew. In my 8 tips on how to store coffee and keep coffee fresh, I give some practical advice on the best ways to keep coffee, as unfortunately there are a number of misconceptions that have developed over the years.  Some people wrongly believe that refridgerating or freezing coffee beans will preserve the taste, for instance.

Basically, my aim is to use my own experience of the coffee trade to help people to make their own quality coffee at home. Anyway, here are my 8 tips on how to store coffee and keep coffee fresh.

1. Buy fresh coffee beans, rather than ground and don’t grind the coffee beans until right before you want to drink them, if you want a full taste.

2. Buy valve sealed bags of coffee beans, not vacuum sealed. Because of the process used, coffee beans that are vacuum sealed have already sat around and lost some of their flavor before the vacuum sealing begins.

3. Store coffee in an airtight container. Otherwise they will quickly begin to lose their taste. The ideal material for a coffee container is glass or ceramic.

4. Store coffee in a place that is cool, dark and dry. After air, moisture is the second greatest enemy of coffee freshness and should be minimized. Keeping coffee in say an ornamental glass jar on the kitchen counter, where it will be exposed to sunlight and possibly heat from an oven, is not a good idea. (Basically you need to store coffee somewhere convenient, but away from its four main enemies, air, moisture, and sources of light and heat).

5. The maximum length of time for storing coffee is one to two weeks. After that, it will have lost much of its freshness . You should therefore buy your coffee in small quantities, enough to last you one or two weeks, if you want it to be fresh.

6. Storing coffee in a freezer should be avoided, if possible. This is because firstly, the coffee is liable to absorb other flavors from the freezer such as seafood and secondly, an essential part of a coffee’s taste is in the oils that it contains and these oils are broken down by the freezing process.

7. Don’t store coffee in the fridge either, for similar reasons to those mentioned above.

8.  If you do have to freeze coffee, then do not return it to the freezer once you’ve removed it.  This might mean splitting up a bulk bag of coffee beans into weekly portions in order to avoid this.  The dramatic temperature changes involved with freezing and thawing are not good for the freshness and should be at least minimized, if not stopped altogether.