I’ve believed that coffee beans should not be frozen. But I hear a lot of people IRL and in media say that they freeze their beans. So is it okay to freeze coffee beans? Or will freezing ‘degrade’ them?
This is a sample of one, but I freeze them and I cannot tell that it degrades them. Of course, they must be in an airtight bad. I just put a big bag of Columbian Supremo beans from Sam’s in the freezer this afternoon.
I remember reading somewhere (alas, I don’t remember where) about a taste test of fresh versus frozen beans. Was it Consumer Reports? Try Googling it.
The conclusion was that freezing coffee beans doesn’t hurt the taste of most beans. Beans that were roasted any time prior to the past 1-2 days won’t be affected so much that you could tell.
This points out that the best bean taste comes from really, really fresh roasted beans. If you can go through a pound of beans in a week, buy a pound and leave it out; otherwise, try vacuum-sealing the rest and freezing them. You probably won’t be disappointed. You may not even notice the difference!
After literally decades of pursuing an intense, hopeless, and obsessive passion about coffee, I conclude that the following affect the taste, in descending priority order:
[ol]
[li]Bean quality - cheap beans taste crappy[/li][li]Brewing technique - making coffee right produces delicious coffee; making it wrong produces battery acid.[/li][li]Cleanliness of apparatus - old gunk in the maker makes your coffee taste like, well, old gunk![/li][li]Water quality[/li][li]Bean age[/li][/ol]
I left out type of bean and type of brewing because I find that to be enormously subjective. I am evenly split between medium roast fine Columbian (not the crap you find in Safeway) and dark roast Moka Java blend. I often resort to drip brew to save time, but I also know that the best results come from a properly used french press.
I won’t freeze my coffee anymore. My coffee grower believes that it does affect taste, and she is the expert!
From what I have come to understand through reading, the problem is not the freezing process itself, it is the unfreezing and refreezing.
You buy a pound of beans, come home, and put them in the freezer. The next morning, you retrieve the beans, measure into your grinder, then place the remaining beans into the freezer. What happens is that in your comparatively warm kitchen, water condenses onto the beans. You want your beans to have as little contact as possible with water (until, of course, you are ready to brew the coffee itself).
The remedy for this situation is to store the beans in separate batches, and only take as many out as you need. The condensation won’t matter if you’ll be brewing with those beans a few minutes later, but you wouldn’t want to store them that way.
I don’t know how accurate it is, but I saw it repeated several places (who all, of course, could have copied from the same inaccurate source…).
We bought coffee from a grower (in Australia) and they told us to keep the beans in the freezer…
We’ve discussed this issue many, many times. Our Foodie Lord & Master, Alton Brown, makes exactly (almost verbatim) this point. And if Alton says so, well, then it must be true.
There isn’t really any benefit to freezing roasted coffee beans. The real issue is getting fresh-roasted coffee to begin with. I roast my own, and my own observations seem to coincide with the pros - coffee roasted that day is good, but let it “rest” about a day, maybe two - and the aroma will knock your socks off. It really benefits from out-gassing for about 24-48 hours. Then it declines rapidly, so let’s call it “fresh” for 1 week.
Whatever they are selling at the local grocery might be good quality coffee, but it’s weeks old because the turnover isn’t there. Another observation - even the finest coffees, once thoroughly ground and stale, taste remarkably like any of the major canned commercial offerings. I just don’t think there is any way to preserve fresh-coffee per se.
How?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Oh, it’s easy as pie - or popcorn maybe. You can use an iron skillet over the stove, but a really handy way is to use an old-school air type popcorn popper. Or even older-schooler stovetop popper with the crank handle? It’s kind of smoky and your neighbors will start stalking you with the big 1/2 gallon insulated coffee mugs.
Of course there are much more expensive commercial style roasters that will do the job better, the sky is the limit! The important thing though, is the coffee. It’s handy to have a few pounds of different types, you can roast up one or two pounds and not get tired of a certain type or style.
Here’s my take on storing and freezing coffee beans.
The primary purpose of freezing foods is to retard spoilage, mainly from bacterial action. Freezers also remove moisture, modern “frost free” freezers are especially good at this.
What causes coffee beans to lose flavor is the loss, or drying out, of the natural oils.
Therefore, I believe that the best way to store the beans is in a vacuum. This can be done if you have one of those kitchen vacuum devices. Failing that, they should be kept in an airtight container, in a cool dark place, as light and heat can also effect the oil content and accelerate drying.
Roasted beans are unlikely to be subjected to bacterial deterioration, but the freezing will remove moisture, thus freezing is not only unnecessary, but detrimental.
As said previously, buying small amounts of newly roasted beans is probably the best way to insure freshness, but somewhat impractical. Vacuum storage is probably the next best solution. In the end you want to prevent drying out of the oils, so whatever method you choose should be done w/ that in mind.