A Re-Freshed Approach to Coffee
Our guiding company principals are fresh coffee, fair trade, green business.
“Fresh Coffee” is about re-introducing consumers to the natural sweetness and aroma of a beverage with distinctive regional tastes and flavours. It is pure enjoyment for coffee lovers. It is also the economic driver of our business and our reason for loving coffee so much.
The Facts on Coffee Freshness
Since the turn of the 20th century, the industrialization of the coffee supply chain has centralized production, processing, roasting, grinding, packaging and distribution. Moreover, multinationals wishing to avoid the logistical problems of operating a network of roasters to supply fresh coffee in local markets, took full control of roasting through the creation of large centralized plants.
The resulting supply chain has dramatically increased the distribution time of roast and ground coffee from days to—at best, 2 to 3 weeks—and more typically 3 to 4 months for retail/pre-packaged coffee.
- The truth is that over 95% of the coffee consumed in North America is stale.
- Consumers have been misinformed. They have been lead to believe that packaging keeps coffee fresh and this simply is not true.
- Green beans remain fresh for a period of 1-10 years depending on the variety (most about 3 years for best flavour).
- Once roasted, coffee beans keep their naturally sweet and full flavour for just 3-7 days. this short shelf life is due to vapour pressures that negatively impact coffee’s flavour within days after roasting.
- And once ground, roasted beans last 3-5 hours before losing their volatile fresh flavours.
The Basic Science Behind Coffee Freshness
Raw or un-roasted coffee beans look like roasted coffee beans except they are green, slightly smaller, tasteless and odourless. It takes 15 minutes to roast a green bean at 450°F/235°C. During the roasting process, sugars and carbohydrates inside the green bean caramelize in a chemical reaction called pyrolysis that creates over 800 volatile, water soluble, coffee oils, giving coffee 100% of its naturally sweet and unique taste. However, true fresh coffee flavour is limited by the time it spends exposed to oxygen after roasting, and packaging cannot preserve freshness.
Care to learn more about the science? A single fresh roasted coffee bean produces seven times its volume in inert gas (mainly carbon dioxide) and in quantity, is sufficient to explode conventional packaging (hence the predominant use of metal canisters, vacuum bricks, and foil bags with one way valves). It takes five days for roasting gases to leave the bean naturally. During this time, the gas binds with coffee oils. 85% of coffee’s fresh taste is carried away as aroma by escaping roasting gases. After the gas is gone, oxygen readily penetrates the bean, turning all remaining oils rancid. Bitterness sets in at this point. Grinding accelerates the staling process to just 4 hours (because it creates a greater surface area) and brewing takes it down to 15 minutes (because water contains oxygen, which attack and destroys coffee oils upon contact). Coffee Science Source: Michael Sivetz).
In short, coffee, like bread, has a short shelf life. It is twice as complex as the finest red wine and just as volatile. Roasted coffee must be consumed within 5 days after roasting to considered truly fresh ans ground only before brewing.
The take away here is that the best way to control a coffee’s freshness is to buy it fresh from the roast or roast your own. Learn how to roast green beans in your oven