Storing Your Coffee Beans
So you’ve filled The Bean Bag with a pound of beautiful, toast-toned, freshly-roasted Guatemalan beans, made the trek back home through traffic and are unpacking your grocery bags, storing each item in its place.
The apples go in the frig to retain their crispness. The garlic comes out of the plastic bag and into a basket – garlic lasts longest when it’s kept out of the light, with good air circulation. If you use it up fairly quickly, keep it in a small basket on the counter, out of the sun. If it takes you a while to go through, place the basket on a cupboard shelf, where it can hang out in the dark with the rice and cornmeal.
And now, for the coffee.
The Bean Bag was designed by and for coffee lovers, whether you brew a cup of single-origin reserve every morning or pour yourself some breakfast blend on the way out the door.
For the aficionados, we recommend following the National Coffee Association’s optimal coffee storage guidelines here. To keep coffee at maximum freshness, experts recommend storing whole beans in an air-tight storage container. When you get home from the store with fresh beans, either empty the beans from your Bean Bag into the storage container or place the entire Bean Bag in the container. Pump the vacuum button to remove as much air as possible and set the container away from the sun or any heat source to retain as much freshness as possible.
Many devoted coffee drinkers are less concerned about maintaining absolute peak freshness and are happy to keep their coffee beans or grounds in the bag until using them. Paper bags allow oxygen to reach your beans, and even in the freezer can affect taste if stored this way for several weeks, or longer. We recommend an air-tight container if you need to freeze your beans.
Here’s a brief article from the National Coffee Association on optimal coffee storage: http://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/How-to-Store-Coffee
next post, we’ll answer the burning question: what is that little valve really for, on pre-packaged coffees?