Posts Tagged 'storing coffee beans'

All coffee beans are highly perishable. The lifespan of a newly opened bag of coffee is about the same as a newly opened, fresh loaf of bread. If left exposed to air, it will go stale within a few days. This is particularly true of ground coffee since so much more of a ground-up bean’s surface area is exposed to flavour-robbing air.

Ideally, coffee should be removed from an oxygen environment as soon as its roast is complete. But there is a hitch: fresh-roasted coffee lets off a delicious smelling gas for several days after roasting, but this “gassing off” is powerful enough to burst any package containing the coffee. Historically, roasters would let the coffee “gas off” for several days, or would poke holes in their packages to avoid exploding bags. Both packing practices allowed fresh ground coffee to start going stale.