Portharbor.com Coffee Roasting

For the best cup of coffee, start with quality beans, a quality roast, and store them properly to maximize freshness and flavor.

Without a doubt, fresh roasted coffee will provide the best coffee experience. But how fresh?

According to some roasters, “The belief that if you are not drinking coffee right out of the roaster, it will be stale and taste bad is a complete myth.”

In fact, coffee actually benefits from some aging. Straight out of the roaster, the coffee seed is packed full of gas. However, if you let your coffee sit around exposed to oxygen for months on end, it’s going to be stale and not have that exciting pop its fresh counterpart would. So how long should you wait and how long is too long? If you order fresh roasted coffee from Portharbor.com, it will be sent out within a day or two of being roasted, with shipping, it should arrive at an ideal time to enjoy.

Remember, coffee beans start to loose their flavor shortly after being roasted and even faster after grinding the beans. Oxygen and bright light are the worst flavor busters for roasted beans, Always store coffee beans in an airtight container. Some better quality coffees (like those sold at PortHarbor.com) are sold in good resealable bags and may even have a one way valve to help remove the oxygen. In addition to the freshness of the beans, the quality is also important. Here again, a lot of this is subjective.

Remember if the coffee is whole bean and sealed in its original bag with a one-way degassing valve, that coffee should taste delicious for quite some time after that roast date (once again, this is subjective, a month may be ok, years, not so much).

Freshly ground coffee makes a big difference
Remember the aroma of the coffee when you first open the bag of ground coffee. Days later you don’t notice that same aroma. Buying whole coffee beans and grinding it right before brewing the coffee will make a difference in the taste of the brewed coffee. The best tasting brews are made from beans ground just before brewing.

Storing coffee beans
The National Coffee Association says that coffee is hygroscopic, or “it absorbs moisture—and odors, and tastes—from the air around it.” They also suggests that you keep beans airtight and cool. This goes hand-in-hand with not using beans that are not too old. Even the freshest beans won’t do the trick if they are not stored correctly. Finally they recommend that you grind the coffee beans right before brewing the coffee.

Just like how food goes bad, so does coffee. Exposure to air is bad for your beans. This is especially important when buying pre-ground coffee, because it loses its freshness quite quickly due to the additional surface area which increases it’s exposure to oxygen. If you buy whole beans, grind the amount you need immediately before brewing.

Coffee begins to lose freshness shortly after roasting. Try to buy smaller batches of freshly roasted coffee more frequently. If you prefer to buy beans in a larger quantity (but not too large of a quantity), it may be a good idea to divide your coffee supply into two portions, with the smaller one for the daily coffee brewing and the larger portion to be opened only to refill the smaller container.