How Shall I Store Fresh Coffee?

How shall I store fresh coffee?

Like all fresh produce, the fresher the coffee, the better it is; so you ideally don’t want to be storing it for a long time. To get around the storing of fresh coffee, we feel that prevention is better than the cure. For instance, our top tip would be to order little and often, omitting the need to store fresh coffee for longer than you need. We’ve all had that moment where we’ve sorted out a kitchen cupboard, found some old coffee hiding at the back next to the canned food and five spice, and it smells vaguely of coffee and dust. Fresh is Best!

While you are working your way through a bag of our delicious coffee, however, the best way to store your coffee is somewhere cool, dry and airtight.

Fresh Coffee

We know through experience that coffee is at its freshest between three and fourteen days after roasting. It’s best drunk within four weeks of being roasted. Oxygen is not friends with coffee. It attacks the coffee beans causing a reaction. A bit like when you get rust on metal, removing the flavours from the coffee and slowly turning it stale. It happens a lot quicker to ground coffee because more of the surface area of the bean is exposed to the air. With this in mind, we always suggest to buy whole bean where possible and grind yourself when needed.

We understand, however, that this is not always the most feasible option. Therefore we do offer to grind your coffee for you too. When we do so, we’ll only grind coffee to order at the last possible minute before it leaves us; to guarantee maximum freshness.

The biggest part of storing fresh coffee is having fresh coffee to begin with.

To make sure the coffee is as fresh as it can be when it arrives with you, we only roast in small batches, multiple times each week. This means that every time you receive a bag of coffee, it’s only a couple of days since it was roasted. We even include the roasted on date on the bag, so you can see just how fresh your coffee is.

We only source the best quality beans, known as speciality coffee.

Speciality coffee has much, much fewer impurities, meaning, it doesn’t need to be roasted for very long, unlike lower grade coffee which is full of defects and therefore needs a longer, darker roast to mask the impurities. Roasting darker means the coffee can taste burnt and bitter. We never source commodity grade coffee and therefore we don’t have to worry about roasting to mask flavours. Instead, Speciality coffee is full of flavour, and so we roast to highlight these. If we over roast, we’ll end up losing those flavours and spoiling what would be amazing coffee.

To keep our coffee fresh, we import small batches of single origin beans and keep them in a humidity-controlled environment, only roasting the beans as and when we need them. This means the beans stay fresher for longer, which we think is way better than roasting the whole batch in one go.

Less is more

As mentioned, when ordering your beans, we recommend ordering a small amount each week, or whenever you need it, rather than en masse. You’ll know that every delivery you receive has been freshly roasted that week. Whether we hand deliver to you as a wholesale customer or deliver via royal mail straight to your door, you don’t have to worry about the cost of a weekly delivery, because all deliveries are free to our subscribers! We feel that it makes sense to get fresh coffee delivered each week, rather than having a big delivery just sat around, taking up space for weeks.

Where should I keep my coffee?

When you have coffee to store until your next coffee delivery, there are a few do’s and don’t when it comes to keeping it as fresh as possible. For instance, we advise that you keep it in the sealed bag that it came in, or in an airtight container, like a Two Chimps Coffee storage tin!

Most fresh coffee bags, including ours, are fitted with a one-way valve which allows the CO2 gasses to be released from the coffee while keeping the oxygen out. This valve ensures that your coffee stays fresher for longer. You should store your coffee in a cool place, out of the sunlight, but not too cool like the fridge or freezer.

It’s a common misconception that coffee should be kept in the fridge.

We strongly advise not to store coffee in the fridge as the change in temperature when adding or removing can cause moisture, which is also coffee’s enemy. It will depreciate your beans and remove the lovely flavours by causing condensation within the packet.

Speciality Coffee

We mentioned earlier that we only source speciality coffee, this is because it’s the best. We source fresh green beans through our importer, using direct trade, meaning that the farmers are getting the best price possible for their beans.

The harvests are seasonal and often very small, meaning our coffees do change from time to time. Buying coffee this way means not only are we getting amazing quality coffee, we’re also not buying a five year supply at a time. In turn, it is fresher when it gets to us, and we can keep it really fresh before we need it for roasting.

Speciality coffee has been well looked after through its life.

It is picked and sorted by hand before it is graded and scored for quality.  We want to continue giving it lots of care and attention by hand roasting it to perfection. The flavours you find within speciality coffee are so tasty; we certainly don’t want to lose them. We want our customers to have super fresh, super tasty coffee all the time.

It all sounds very tasty!

It is! The fresher the coffee, the tastier it is. Order from our shop with same day dispatch with free 1st class tracked delivery over £25.

If you are a wholesale coffee customer, order direct with us. Not only that but we’ll deliver your wholesale coffee order for free whenever you need it.

So, before you store fresh coffee, you best go ahead and order some! Find the freshest coffees available right now in our Shop.

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