Letters to George ~ freshness
George, I have enjoyed your various coffees for about a year now. All outstanding, I hope you can clearly and with integrity answer the following. Once a bean is picked and air dried, and roasted there and then (or within a day or two), what is the difference in that taste of coffee, versus, you hauling it to the USA, freezing it for a few months or more and then roasting it and selling it to us. Is the difference night and day, is it close in taste? I know varieties are different, and I know your process of attempted freshness is commendable, but I still would like your honest answer. Also, do you ship the beans frozen from the location of growth, or only when you get it here? Thanks, Jerry
Hi Jerry,
A coffee roasted in country of origin and one roasted here should be similar, assuming the green coffee was well dried, harvested recently, well packaged and stored. High grown coffee will stay at peak flavor for several months before noticeably aging. It even requires up to two months storage, after harvest, to “rest” before roasting. Roasted coffee is far more fragile than green coffee however; its shelf life is far shorter as well. Also: the cost to ship individual packets of roasted coffee from countries of origin is far less efficient and therefore more expensive than shipping bulk quantities green and then roasting here.
Green coffee stability can vary a great deal. Dense hard beans, if they are properly dried, can hold up for several months with very little degradation. Such a coffee should have been dried immediately at high altitude with moderate temperatures and moderate to low humidity. This is the basis for “seasonal coffees” which many advanced quality roasters promote. Recent better packaging of green at origin (vacuum sealed and GrainPro bags, instead of just jute) has greatly helped by prolonging shelf life considerably. Strictly hewing to a seasonal policy only, however, leads to just purchasing approximately a third of what one could buy from a farmer, which is why we freeze estate green coffees that are truly exceptional in their craftsmanship. Such coffees are more than mere produce. They deserve the attention-over-time given to estate wines and teas. We freeze these selected coffees only after they have arrived here at our warehouse. Freezing dramatically slows (if not outright stops) the aging process, as demonstrated by a number of our award winning one to two-year-old coffees in the past. I do not know of any research on freezing green coffees but I am actively looking!
The invisible enemy of green coffee freshness is water activity: water that remains un-bonded and is thus free to roam around the bean and wreck havoc through oxidation ( a bit poetic – but gets the point across!). This typically happens during the green drying process when drying is temporarily reversed due to poor weather conditions and insufficient controls; beans reabsorb moisture and the stage is set for more rapid degradation. Free water also leads to larger ice crystals within frozen green coffees, and poorer stability, while molecularly bonded water produces very little crystallization.
I hope this answers your question satisfactorily! I really appreciate the feedback and queries!
George