How to Store Coffee Beans
Keeping your coffee beans fresh means brewing rich, full-bodied coffees, day after day. Find out how to keep your coffee beans in great condition for longer
Can Coffee Beans Go Bad?
Like all of us, coffee beans aren’t immune to going bad. Expired or stale beans won’t make you sick or taste rotten, but they will lose their flavour and make a bland cup of coffee.
What Causes Coffee Beans to Go Off?
Coffee beans have some enemies:
- Moisture: roasted beans will absorb moisture, causing molecules to dissolve, resulting in a loss of flavour and quality.
- Heat: temperatures over 25 degrees can accelerate the aging process of coffee beans.
- Sunlight: in a very vampiric fashion, roasted coffee beans are very sensitive to sunlight, which can break down the molecules inside the beans and cause them to go stale.
- Oxygen: oxygen causes coffee beans to oxidise, a process that robs them of their flavour and aroma.
How to Store Coffee Beans to Keep Them Fresh
To protect your coffee beans and keep them fresh, it’s best to store your beans in an airtight container, somewhere cool, dry, and dark.
Best Places to Store Coffee Beans
The best places to store coffee beans will be places that are cool, but not too cold, and away from direct sunlight. Avoid moist places, such as near the sink or the kettle, and store in a sealed container.
Best Containers to Store Coffee Beans
Your container should be airtight in order to keep your coffee beans fresh, and if you’re storing your beans out in the open that an opaque container will protect them from light. Our hack for keeping our coffee beans fresh? A Grind Bean & Ground Tin.
Can You Freeze Coffee Beans?
It’s not illegal… but it really should be. Freezing your coffee beans changes the cell structure, absorbing the flavours of whatever else is in your freezer and losing its natural flavours and aroma.
When you take them out of the freezer to thaw, their flavour profile will become even flatter as the change in temperature will further affect the beans’ chemical structure.
Can You Store Coffee Beans in the Fridge?
Again, please don’t. Coffee is porous and, like it would in the freezer, will take on flavours of other strong foods in the fridge (think onions, garlic and cheese).
The cold temperature and humidity mean that the beans will partially brew and lose their potency.
How Long Do Coffee Beans Last?
Freshly roasted coffee beans will be at their freshest and most flavourful for 4 to 5 weeks, but they’ll still be perfectly enjoyable for up to 3 months.
After that, the beans will noticeably lose their flavour and aroma and create a pretty boring cup of coffee.
How to Tell if Coffee Beans Are Stale
Annoyingly, you can’t tell if coffee beans are stale just by looking at them. They will, however, lose the intense and powerful aroma they have when they are fresh, so this is a good telltale sign that they are past their best.
You’ll know your coffee beans are stale if the cup of coffee they create is bland, bitter, and incredibly anticlimactic.
Grind’s Coffee Beans
So, you know how to store your coffee beans now. Next, you need the best coffee beans. Grind Whole Bean Coffee comes in four different blends, including a decaf blend, depending on how you like to drink your brew.
Our coffee beans are always ethically sourced from sustainable, small-scale farms around the world, before being roasted by us in London.
Subscribe to our letterbox-friendly refills of whole-bean coffee, earning you a free Grind tin, and you’ll never have to worry about your coffee beans going bad.
