"coffee storage" news and stories

Coffee and friends in the freezer, where they should not be cohabitating. Photo: Erin Meister

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is the seventh in a series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

Let's face it: The world ain't ideal, and situations get hairy sometimes. I've been reduced to substituting paper towels for coffee filters before, so maybe you've had to keep your coffee beans in the freezer because your kitchen's the size of a walnut shell. You'll get no judgments from me, but I am here to help, and part of that means breaking (or reiterating) the news that coffee is best stored away from your icy asparagus tips.

Most high-quality retail coffee -- like the bag in the picture above, though it's living in the wrong place -- is packaged specifically to keep beans fresh, with the addition of a one-way valve that lets the coffee release necessary gases after being roasted but does not let air in to stale the java. Because it's bagged fresh and can be resealed properly, you should be able to simply keep whole-bean coffee in its bag or an air-tight container in a cool, dry place -- but definitely, definitely not the refrigerator.

Read more about coffee storage after the jump.

While I am typically not particularly picky when it comes to food or drink. However, when coffee is concerned, I am pretty darn selective (my coffee addiction has been well-documented here, here and here). I love coffee, and don't have a whole lot of tolerance for weak, burnt or stale coffee. However, even I sometimes get tangled in the "how to store you coffee bean" debate. For years I fell firmly in the camp that believed that coffee should live in the freezer. But then I read somewhere that it was best to keep it at room temperature and so I begrudgingly switched. These days I keep my coffee out on the counter, in large part because I go through it fast enough that I don't worry about the oils in the beans going bad.

Over at the Unclutterer, Erin has put together a helpful guide with tips on how best to store coffee. According to her research, my storage technique seems to be okay (room temperature is acceptable, as is the freezer for beans that you want to keep for the long term). She does stress that coffee beans should not be stored in the fridge, as it is far too moist in there.

How do you guys store your coffee beans? Fridge, freezer, room temperature or some combination?

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