Freezing Results

Whenever I order a 12oz bag of coffee I notice that while it’s good and fresh the first 7-9 days or so after the roast date, the quality starts to taper off quickly from there. The issue is it takes about 18 days or so for me to go through a bag. That’s 10 days of not super fresh coffee. So a couple of weeks ago I posted about freezing a small amount of coffee to see if I could extend the life of it a bit.


I decided I just wanted to do a bit of time shifting, not months in advance but only a week. So I froze half the coffee in the double Ziploc bag pictured (I actually ended up double bagging them). I also covered them in paper so light couldn’t get through the bag.

/files/u15199/baggedcoffee.png" width="375" height="500" align="middle" />


I heard some of you say on my previous post that Ziploc was not the way to go, so I was a bit worried about that, but the beans were already frozen so I decided not to transfer them.


One week later I retrieved the beans, let them completely thaw without opening the bag, and ground and fixed the coffee as normal. The result was pretty much what I would get when I first get the beans, pretty impressive since these beans were now about 12 days old. I did notice the beans seemed a bit oiler than they were when I first got them, but I didn’t notice any difference in the taste.


So, from now on I think I’ll be freezing half my beans. The Ziploc bags seem to work fine as long as you aren’t going for long term storage. Since I’ll be using them for probably at most two weeks or so I don’t see any reason to change. So if you’re like me and have issues going through 12oz. of beans before they go stale, you might give this a try.