One of the biggest benefits of roasting beans at home is that green beans last longer than roasted beans. This begs the question, however, do green coffee beans spoil? How long can you keep green coffee beans before they lose their freshness?
Coffee beans are organic plant material after all. Even after processing, coffee beans still have about 10% moisture in them. This means eventually green coffee beans will rot and decay. However, if you keep them in an airtight container away from sunlight and moisture, unroasted green coffee beans will last for 1-2 years.
There are a lot of factors which impact your unroasted beans before they even reach your house. How they’re picked, how they’re processed, and how they’re shipped can all impact their condition when you finally receive them. This can impact both taste and storage times.
How Beans Are Processed
Technically coffee beans aren’t really beans at all, they’re seeds. The coffee seed grows inside a red berry about the size of an olive, which is known as a cherry. Coffee cherries are picked by hand or by machine and processed.
There are three ways to process the coffee cherries; wet processing, dry processing, and semi-dry processing. In all three methods, the bean/seed is separated from the cherry and dried. Even after the beans are dried, they retain about 10% of their original moisture content. This is actually important, because it helps to keep the beans from becoming stale during shipment from their country of origin to your house. The beans are sorted, graded, and packed in large bags.
Like most cargo around the world, the bags are packed in large metal shipping containers and sent by ship to their destination. The metal housing of the container helps to prevent contamination from odors of other cargo, but mistakes do happen from time to time.
Why Do My Green Beans Smell Like Burlap?
Often, the bags used to ship unroasted coffee beans are made of burlap. Shipping coffee and burlap sacks and storing them in burlap sack for a long time can lead to a “baggy” taste even after roasting. For this reason, many coffee estates now use synthetic bags instead of burlap.
How to Store Unroasted Coffee Beans
Let’s suppose that you have avoided all of these dangers. Your beans didn’t get stale from being too dried out during processing. They don’t smell like burlap and they didn’t pick up any odors on the cargo ship. You have a perfect shipment of green, unroasted coffee beans at your house. How long will these beans stay fresh?
Store your coffee beans in an airtight container in a cool, dry place. Moisture and dampness will lead to faster rot and decay. Plastic bags, glass jars, or plastic containers all work well to store unroasted beans, provided they have an airtight seal. This prevents the beans from picking up odors from other foods in your kitchen.
Avoid direct sunlight because of UV rays and higher temperatures. If you follow these directions, you can keep your beans for one to two years before you have to worry about them going bad. If your beans smell musty, you can roast them and see if it impacts the taste or just toss them and get some new beans. If they’re musty when you receive them from your supplier, I would talk to the supplier and see if they’re willing to provide you a refund or replacement.
How Much Storage Space Does Coffee Take?
I typically use one pound of coffee per week. If you’re like me, that means you’ll go through about 50-55 pounds of coffee in a year. Coffee is very dense. Fifty-five pounds of coffee will fit easily in a 1x1x2 foot box. So storage should not be a problem.
Most people aren’t going to buy 50 pounds of coffee at once anyway, so it’s unlikely that you’ll need to store your unroasted beans for even a year, let alone two. I usually order a new supply of beans every four months.
Should I Freeze Unroasted Beans?
To freeze or not to freeze. This is a question that coffee fans definitely have an opinion on, and the same arguments for and against freezing roasted beans apply to unroasted beans. There are two potential pitfalls associated with freezing unroasted coffee beans.
First, the beans might absorb odors from other foods in your freezer. This will change the taste of the beans once they’re roasted.
Second, the moisture in the beans can freeze. This will change how the roasting process works because the moisture will have to thaw before the beans can dry out in the roaster.
I don’t know about you, but I have more pantry space than freezer space. So I like to reserve my freezer space for foods that will spoil far quicker than unroasted coffee beans. As I’ve said, they’ll stay good for a year or two in your pantry. There’s no real need to freeze them but if you want to try it, feel free.