In Idaho Falls most of the people I worked with had never tasted coffee, and a man called Cliff told me the date on the bag is not the one printed on the front. How long beans last, and where to keep them.
Eight years ago I lived in Idaho Falls, a small city on a wide green river in the high desert, and worked at the national laboratory out in the sagebrush, where the wind smelled of dust and sage and, in winter, of nothing at all, and the nearest coffee roasted within the month was a long drive away, and most of the people I worked with had never tasted coffee in their lives.
Chad was one of them, because it was doctrine, and he was entirely relaxed about it, and I was the one who found it interesting. My wife was working then at a company in town that makes household products, where a man named Cliff tasted and smelled things for a living, and once a week the four of us, Cliff and his wife and my wife and I, had lunch in a diner with vinyl booths the colour of ketchup, and it was Cliff who first told me that coffee carries a date, and that the one that matters is the day it was roasted, whatever the front of the bag might say.
I am thinking about Idaho this September because we are planning another move, a much larger one, back to India, a homecoming I mean to do properly after getting a good many things wrong on the long way out, and the planning has the quality that life in Idaho had, where there was nowhere to buy the thing you wanted and so you planned, and the planning, oddly, left you better off than the people who could buy it at any hour.
The question
How long do coffee beans last, and should I keep them in the fridge?
The short answers are less time than you think, and no, and the longer answers are the rest of this note.
Fresh off the roaster tastes bad
This surprises everyone: coffee straight out of the roaster, still warm in the hand, tastes flat and ashy and lifeless, like the smell of a fireplace the morning after, because the bean has just been through something violent and needs to rest.
What is happening is gas, since a freshly roasted bean holds a surprising amount of carbon dioxide under pressure and leaks it over days, fast at first and then slower, the way a bicycle tyre with a slow puncture goes soft. In hot water that gas dissolves into a mild acid, the tang of flat cola, which one writer describes as the taste of licking a nine-volt battery, and it also holds the water physically away from the coffee, like an umbrella, so the extraction stays incomplete, which is why very fresh coffee can taste sharp and weak at the same time.
Rough windows for whole beans. The opened-bag bar is drawn from a bag opened on day 14; the clock starts whenever you open yours. Roast, packaging and storage all move these.
The windows
Every bag: at least half a day after roasting before it is worth brewing at all.
Filter: at its best in the first week or so, and still very good for a few days after that.
Espresso: most of a week before the first shot, because inside a pressurised basket the escaping gas fights the water, and the water loses.
Once opened: a few days at the top of its form, however you store it. This is the number that should change how you buy.
Darker, hotter roasts give off their gas faster and more completely, which is one more reason to love them, since a dark roast is ready sooner and its oils are already on the surface to tell you so, glossy as a beetle's wing, and lighter roasts let theirs go slowly, and a slower release means a less porous bean, which stales more slowly too.
Staling is two things
The first is escape, because the aromatic compounds that make coffee smell like coffee are volatile, which is a chemist's way of saying they leave, like guests after midnight, and you smell them leaving every time you open a bag and every time you walk past a roastery.
The second is oxidation, oxygen finding the flavour compounds and turning them into duller ones the way it turns a cut apple brown, and the two are linked in a way I did not expect, because very fresh coffee oxidises slowly while the pressure of the gas inside keeps the oxygen out, and as the gas runs down the oxygen gets in, and humidity hurries all of it along.
The bag, decoded
That little plastic button on a good coffee bag is a one-way valve, letting the gas out and keeping the air out, and if you press the bag gently you can smell the coffee breathe through it; within minutes of a bag being filled the space inside can be half carbon dioxide, and some roasters flush the bag with nitrogen as well.
The valve cannot stop the gas from leaving, so a bag of three-week-old coffee, freshly opened, goes stale very fast with no gas left inside to guard it, and what the valve buys is time on the shelf, with the real clock starting the moment you cut the bag open.
Keep the flavour in your beans
Where to keep it
Coffee takes on smells the way a wool coat takes on cigarette smoke, and a fridge is damp and full of other people's dinner; the freezer is another country, and here the series pays off a cross-reference, because in the note on grinders I described the research showing that cold beans grind more evenly, so coffee frozen in single doses and ground straight from the freezer gives you the storage and a better grind from one decision.
Cool, dry, dark, sealed, away from anything that smells.
No fridge in an ordinary container.
Freeze in sealed one-dose portions, and grind each straight from frozen.
Never take a large container in and out of the freezer: every trip brings moisture in, and frost on a coffee bean is the end of it.
Never buy pre-ground. Ground coffee is all surface and stale within minutes; the only excuses are a broken grinder or a journey, and then have it ground in front of you and finish it within a day.
Buy small and often
Those four words are the whole note, and they are also the argument for subscriptions and for buying from a roaster instead of a shelf, which I made in the note on buying.
Idaho taught me this by force, because with nowhere to buy I had to order, and to order I had to know how much I would drink in two weeks, and to know that I had to pay attention, and two cups a day at a modest dose each, for a fortnight, comes to a bag of a few hundred grams, which I ordered every two weeks, and I drank better coffee in the sagebrush than I would later drink in New York with a shop on every corner.
Chad, and the rule about hot drinks
The rule Chad's church follows, which most writing about coffee gets wrong, comes from a text received in Ohio in 1833 that never mentions coffee at all; it says that hot drinks are not for the body, and within a few years the church's leaders had explained that hot drinks meant tea and coffee. The text describes itself as counsel rather than commandment, and it was nearly ninety years before keeping it became a requirement for entering a temple, a gap that fascinates me as a picture of how a practice hardens over a lifetime into a rule, the way a footpath worn across a field by many feet becomes, decade by decade, a road.
A few years ago the church clarified for its young people that a drink counts as coffee if it has café or mocha or latte or espresso in its name, or anything ending in a certain Italian syllable, and it did not rule on coffee-flavoured things, which is exactly why the clarification set off so much conversation, and it said nothing, whatever you may have read, about ice cream.
What was it like to be the one person in the room whose morning ritual was someone else's lifelong abstention? Quieter than you would think, because nobody minded, and I made my coffee at home and drank it at my desk while Chad drank a large mug of hot water every morning with a smile, and the two mugs sat a few feet apart all year like neighbours who settled the matter of the fence long ago.
I grew up in Howrah, a few miles down the Hooghly from Belur Math, whose great temple was built to read as a temple or a church or a mosque depending on where you stand, and in a Bengali house the line of Ramakrishna's that everybody knows is jato mat, tato path, as many faiths, so many paths, a phrase a child hears so often that it wears smooth under his feet like a village track, and only far from home does he notice where it leads. Vivekananda carried his master's line to Chicago in September 1893, a hundred and thirty years ago this month, and told a hall full of strangers that his tradition held every religion to be true, and when I remember Chad's hot water beside my dark coffee I see two paths winding up the one hill, each of us keeping to the track our elders cut, and meeting every weekday at the same door in the sagebrush, entirely at ease with the other's cup.
Cliff, who tasted things
Cliff was the other kind of lesson, a man who sniffed coffee for a living in a town where almost nobody drank it, which he found funny and I found stranger the longer I knew him, and at those lunches in the ketchup-coloured booths he would hold his cup under his nose before every sip, eyes half closed, the way you listen for a phone ringing in another room, and then pronounce one word on it, usually a damning one.
His politics were the town's, firmly on the right and held without apology, and they were the least puzzling thing about him; the puzzle was his approach to equality, which I have never managed to describe. He hired people of colour, deliberately, and spoke of it as a principle, and then he could be derisive toward them across the table in a way that made my wife go quiet and study her plate, and I did not know what to do with that at twenty-seven, and I am still not sure I do. I have chosen to set him down whole instead of tidying him, generous with what he knew and ungenerous with people, both at the same lunch, and I have wondered since how many of us carry some version of that seam, the principle in one hand and the unkindness in the other, without ever catching it in a mirror; the coffee advice, at any rate, was good.
The falls on the Snake River at Idaho Falls, with the temple behind. Photo by Sunit Kajarekar on Unsplash.
A detail I only appreciated years later, in Boulder, after the note on water, is that Idaho Falls sits high enough for the kettle to boil already inside the brewing range, so the first town I ever lived in where the water came off the boil at the right temperature for free was a town where most people did not drink coffee, and the river ran on past the white temple on its bank as if it had known all along.
What Cliff said
His advice came as one sentence over a plate of fries, and it is the one thing I would do this morning if I were you:
Buy what you can drink in two weeks.
If the roaster did not print the roast date on the bag, write it there yourself with a marker.
I have a marker in the drawer under the grinder, which has been there through four kitchens and will go in a suitcase to a fifth, in India, and the next note is about losing, for a long season, the nose that every word of this one depends on.
Questions this note answers
How long do coffee beans stay fresh after roasting?
Whole beans need at least twelve hours of rest, taste best from about one to ten days for filter and seven to fourteen for espresso, and slowly fade over a few weeks. Once a bag is opened you have three to five days at the top of its form, however you store it.
Should I keep coffee in the fridge?
No. A fridge adds moisture and smells. Keep beans sealed, cool, dark and dry. If you need to keep coffee for longer than two weeks, the freezer is genuinely good, in sealed single portions ground straight from frozen.
Why does very fresh coffee taste flat?
It is still releasing carbon dioxide from the roast. The gas pushes water away from the grounds and turns into a sour, fizzy taste in the cup. A day or two of rest lets most of it out.
