As an avid Dunkin' Donuts coffee drinker for several decades, I can tell when coffee has been sitting on the burner too long (At Dunkin' they make a fresh pot every 18 minutes, so I heard). But keeping the Coffee Beans fresh is another thing. Here's an article on freshness that explains about natural oils, how they vary in darker roasts, whole beans vs. ground and keeping it fresh. All courtesy of the HuffPost.
Are Your Coffee Beans Stale? Here's An Easy Way To Tell
How to Determine if your Coffee Beans are Stale
There’s a simple way to find out if your whole beans are really fresh.
Put a half-cup of beans into a zip-close bag, squeeze out the air, seal the bag and leave it overnight. Fresh beans will release carbon dioxide and make the bag puff up. Stale beans will leave the bag flat.
Oil plays a role in coffee’s freshness
A bean’s journey from unroasted to stale has some steps along the way. As the beans age, there’s a loss of aromatic compounds. And once they’ve escaped, you won’t be able enjoy them in your cup. Then there are negative flavors created by oxidation from oil in the coffee bean, which will turn rancid over time.
The darkness of the roast plays a big part in how much of that oil will be forced to the surface of the bean.
You’ll see that darker roasts generally have an oily sheen to them. This oil tends to oxidize much faster, and the roasting process actually makes the whole bean more porous and less dense, so all the staling chemistry happens faster with darker roasts.
Whole beans, not ground, stay fresh longer
In addition to the roast, experts highlighted another factor that’s important for how coffee ages.
“Once coffee is ground, staling happens very rapidly,” Hoffmann said. “Most people can spot the difference between freshly ground coffee and coffee that was ground even just a day or two before.” Cheon pointed out that quicker staling with ground coffee isn’t always a bad thing.
“If you’re going camping and don’t have access to a grinder, or if your coffee is particularly fresh, you can artificially accelerate the resting process by pre-grinding your coffee 30 minutes before brewing, instead of waiting a week for that coffee to rest,” he said.
For those wanting the freshest coffee possible, Hoffmann had a tip: “A good coffee grinder for your mornings is the best investment you can make.”
Here’s how to store coffee to preserve freshness.
Official word on proper storage comes from Mark Corey, the head of science and policy for the National Coffee Association, an industry group.
“We generally recommend storing coffee beans in a cool, dark location, ideally in an opaque, airtight container,” he said.
Vonie, the independent consultant, suggested keeping coffee in the same packaging it came in. “If you want to transfer it to a different container, make sure it blocks light and has an airtight seal,” she said.
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