We're going to cut straight to the chase.
Should you store your coffee in the freezer?
Maybe, let's get into this in a little bit more detail.
Talk about when it's good to use the freezer
to store coffee,
and really when it's not.
To start with
let's talk about why you might want to store your coffee
in the freezer.
Very cold temperatures
are great at slowing certain kinds of reactions involved
in things going stale.
Freezer temperatures slow down oxidation,
they prevent the loss of volatile aromatic compounds.
They just generally slow at the staling process.
Now, most domestic freezers don't go cold enough
to completely stop that process.
I think the research done
by a sort of famed coffee scientist, engineer,
roaster builder, Mike ,
said that you needed to store coffee at minus 40.
That magical temperature
where it doesn't matter what units you're talking about.
Anyway, most domestic freezers
live at about minus 20 degrees Celsius.
That's good enough
to help slow the process quite dramatically.
Freezers, however, have a problem.
They are incredibly dry places.
And those kinds of temperatures,
moisture can't stay in the air.
It comes out of the air and forms ice crystals.
If you've ever owned a freezer,
you'll have seen that happen
and you'll know that freezers need deicing.
All of that ice, all of that buildup has come from the air.
Now, how does that affect coffee?
Well, in an ideal world,
we could put coffee in our freezer
and it would slow down the staling
and that would be great.
What we want to do, however,
is really limit the interaction
between the coffee beans
that are now minus 20 degrees Celsius and any kind of air.
What you don't want to do, is this.
You don't want to go and buy a big Kilo bag
and put the whole bag in the freezer,
and then every morning
get the bag out, get your coffee out,
put the bag back in the freezer.
Because all you're gonna do
is introduce lots of fresh humid air into this beans.
You're going to get crystallization of ice on that coffee.
That's just bad in every single way possible.
So here's your best practice.
If you've bought a kilo of coffee,
if you've bought a couple of pounds, three, five
if you've bought more coffee than you need
in the next week or two,
then what you want to do
is parcel it out into one to two week sort of quantities
and freeze those.
You want to get rid of as much air
in whatever you're freezing in as possible, ideally.
Now some people go as far as vacuum packing it,
that's a little extreme
and I'm a little uncomfortable with the amount of wastage
that comes from that.
There are certain things that require the vacuum packaging
and I'm okay with that,
but I think vacuum packaging coffee
just the waste is a little bit ugh for me.
But it is probably the best possible way to do it,
but I wouldn't go so far
as to vacuum seal individual portions
unless you had a coffee that was incredibly expensive
and you were running a very, very, very cold freezer.
So, you've bought that kilo,
you want to parcel it out to say 250 gram,
300 gram, 350 gram,
whatever you prefer into those kinds of parcels.
You can use freezer proved sort of Mason jars,
if you want to do that.
You could obviously use freezer bags if you want to.
Those things are reusable and that thing is good,
or you can just buy three or four
individual normal sized retail bags
and put all but one in the freezer.
And then what you want to do
is take out portion the night before you need it,
do not open it and let it defrost overnight.
That'll do fine just on the counter overnight.
You don't want to open it when the beans are that cold
cause you will get some condensation forming on them,
and broadly speaking
that's just not particularly good for coffee.
You don't really want to do that.
If you've just bought a regular sized retail bag
it's just not worth you freezing that, it's not.
Just use it over the next couple of weeks
and you'll be completely fine.
You're not going to do much
to really change the state of that coffee.
If the coffee is stale out of date to begin with
there's no point freezing it,
nothing good will happen there.
Nothing bad will happen, but nothing good will happen,
So why bother?
In summary, if you've got more fresh roasted coffee
than you need in the next couple of weeks,
take the excess
and portion it into one to two week portions,
seal them air tight.
Get rid of as much air as you can and freeze them.
And then the night before you need a portion
take it out of the freezer,
let it defrost sealed on the counter.
The next morning grind, drink, enjoy.
One more piece of business,
right now in every video we're doing a giveaway.
It's pretty simple.
If you need coffee,
if you can't afford coffee and you need coffee,
you might've been laid off,
you might've been made redundant.
I don't know what's happening.
The world is a crazy place right now.
But if you need coffee and you can't afford it,
there's a giveaway below.
Click the link, enter.
It's free to enter.
I'll pick 10 people, every video, anywhere in the world
and I send you some coffee, if you need it.
If you can afford coffee,
please just go and buy coffee,
support local businesses,
do the right thing.
But if you can't, it's down there.
If you've got questions about freezing
ask them in the comments below.
If I didn't cover something, ask it in the comments below.
If you've had a very different experience to me
or you've had just an experience worth sharing,
share it with us down in the comments below.
For now let me say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.