Home > Articles > Coffee Storage Keeping Coffee Under Wraps Mmm, coffee.  Ever since I was a little boy and my mother and I would go to the local Coffee and Tea Mart for fresh pasta, coffee, and the New York Times, I wanted to drown in the aroma of fresh roasted coffee beans.  Heaven's scent may not be far off from a fresh batch of roasted Guatemalan Antigua! The more things change, the more they stay the same.  I still go to our local gourmet shop (although I'm one of it's principal partners!), get my coffee, scone and Wall Street Journal, and relish the aroma of a fresh-roasted coffee bean from the moment I walk into our store to the moment I get the brown paper bag home.  Only now I know better. My mother used to get the fresh roasted coffee ground at the coffee shop, because she didn't like to grind coffee at home (it was a hassle then, with the shabby blade grinders of old).  So, the aromatic bag would stay perched on our kitchen counter until it was emptied, and the time had come to buy another bag.  And, true, our car and home would have trace scents of freshly ground coffee for several days after bringing home the bag.  But, little did we know then that the smell of coffee was really the taste escaping! Okay, it's not that simple.  But, it is true that when coffee is ground, more surface area is exposed to air.  The multitude of new surface areas begin exchanging gases with the ambient air, and after several days, no matter how the grounds are stored, the coffee is considered by most connoisseurs to be stale. A few days!  Yup.  But that's just ground coffee.  Even if you get coffee beans, you have to take care to store them correctly, or else your beans will go stale rapidly.  What to do?  You should be able to store a pound of beans for several weeks without a significant amount of flavor being lost. So, now the question is how to store those beans.  Tradition has it that you store them in the freezer.  This was thought to be a good idea because it retards the oxidation process.  There are a couple of problems with this tradition.  First off, if you freeze the beans and don't preportion them, you run the risk of contaminating the lot of beans each time you take the container out and remove just what you need.  Second, if the beans are frozen, they may have more moisture in/on them, and will need to be dried for up to a full hour, then blotted dry, in order to get proper grinding in a burr grinder.  Refrigerating the beans is an alternative to freezing them, however, it too runs into the problem of moisture involved with freezing, just to a lesser extent.  Just make sure your beans are dry once you are ready to grind, and you should be alright An alternative to refrigerating the beans is storing them in airtight containers in a cool dry place, which will keep them from oxidizing quickly.  A method we like to recommend is placing half (or two-thirds, or three-quarters, etc.) of your fresh beans in the refrigerator in an airtight container, and placing the other half in an airtight container in a cool, dry place (ie, most kitchen counters).  Every time you run out of beans in your unrefrigerated lot, just pull a load out from your refrigerated beans, and continue this way until it's time to refuel.  If you must store grounds, follow the same instructions as are listed above, only note that the freshness time for ground coffee is just a fraction of what it is for beans. Little did I realize, as an eleven-year-old boy, that the wonderful aroma that followed our  bag of coffee beans was really the grounds oxidizing and causing the beans to rapidly grow stale.  What a treat it is today to be able to impart a nugget of wisdom onto my own mother!  And I hope I've shared something new with a few readers, too.