How Fresh Is Your Coffee

To truly talk about fresh coffee we need to start at the beginning.

Green Coffee Bean Freshness
Fresh really begins all the way back to the day it is harvested from the coffee trees and how quickly the farmer gets it to market. The quicker it is sold at the auction, put on a ship to the US, unloaded, moved into a truck, delivered to a storage warehouse and sold to a roaster, the fresher the green coffee will be.

Roaster to Your House
TIME! Oh' so important for your roasted bean. There is a whole science experiment that could go with this part of it. How long does it take for your roasted coffee to degas? DEGAS? What? Yes, coffee beans do have gas. But you do want to be near them when they degas, unlike uncle Fred. It takes about 15 days for the degassing to be complete. It's all downhill from there. Deterioration starts, wonderful flavor is lost and aroma will start to diminish over time. If you pre-grind your coffee it will happen even quicker. So drink your coffee in the first 15 days and you will not have to worry about that. Now this is a problem I have with the big companies out there. They tell you that they vacuum seal your coffee to hold in the freshness. What a load of S****! (stuff) If you vacuum seal coffee before it is done degassing the bag expands and could even pop. So if it is in a brick, it must have been done degassing before it was even put in the package.

So what am I telling you here? Buy a 15 day supply, fresh from the roaster, take it straight home and put it into an air tight glass container. (Like a Ball Jar, but don't crank it down too tight.) Enjoy all the ever changing pleasant flavors that happen in the first 15 days, and then order your next batch and start all over again. Try a different origin or blend to mix things up a bit. Don’t get caught in a coffee rut, there are hundreds of origins out there just waiting for you to bring them home. Midwest Coffee Company has 15 to chose from and they are all grown and produced 100% chemical free.

Storage is a major element in freshness. The amount of oxygen exposure your beans have will speed up the deterioration process. Light and temperature also play a part in freshness. We are constantly asked about storing coffee in the refrigerator or freezer. EEET, wrong. No fridg, no freezer. Put in an airtight glass, stainless steel, ceramic, or an old coffee or cookie tin. Put it in your pantry. Cool, dark, airtight. Perfect. Ah! I feel better. I can tell you stories about ice crystals and onions and Jell-O and your coffee if you want, just let me know.

Now the last part of this FRESH story is all about BREWING and drinking your coffee.Grind it, brew it, and drink it. Don’t let it sit on the burner; put the leftover straight into a pre-warmed carafe or drink it all. Now in a perfect world we would all do this. Right? But some of us have to get up early and don’t function very well until we have had that first cup of coffee. Okay then, go ahead and grind it the night before, put it in your brewer with the timer set for way too early, and since it is not a perfect world and if your coffee has only been roasted for a few days, you may not notice that it sat in the coffee pot all night. But don’t forget to close the top on the brewer, the cat may lick it. You don't really know what they do when the lights go out. It could be a real cat party.

What to brew in? There are so many wonderful choices and they are all good in there their own way. All methods will bring out something different in you fresh roasted coffee. I use several different methods and I am willing to experiment with others. Do you have a suggested method or a serious preference? Let me know. I will try it.

This is just some extra information that we can’t really do anything about, but it can affect the quality and flavor of you fresh coffee. Things like, how long it sits on a hot ship, on the dock and in the truck, or how about a cold dock and freezing in a truck on route to the warehouse, all of these things affect the moisture content of the green coffee. These are elements that are out of the roaster's control. Several green brokers are working on storage and shipping solutions for the future of our precious coffee beans.