That is the question: Whether ’tis nobler to save your coffee not in the freezer or to take arms against the sea of troubles, and store them in the freezer.
Is freezing your coffee a good idea? Well it turns out it does make a big difference. Older generations have stored their Folgers coffee in the freezer and up until recently, this seemed like a really bad way to store your coffee. But like bell bottoms, trends tend to be cyclical and there has been a lot of talk about freezing coffee as a way to preserve coffee again. This got me thinking and I wanted to test the theory myself.
I’d really like to be able to test aged frozen vs aged non-frozen vs fresh coffee, but unfortunately it’s hard to hold all the variables constant. It would be hard or impossible to do because if you freshly roasted the same green coffee a year later to compare to the preserved aged coffee, it wouldn’t be the same green coffee you started with.
Misa Coffee Roasters doesn’t have a time machine yet; so we tried the next best thing and compared 2 coffees from the same roasting batch. We vacuum sealed 2 samples of freshly roasted coffee after 3 days of letting the coffee off gas. Then we froze 1 sample and kept the other sample at room temperature. We then waited almost 1 full year (more precisely, 11 months and 2 weeks) and then blindly cupped the coffees.
The result was certainly interesting! Upon opening the 2 vacuum sealed bags (I let the frozen sample unthaw to room temp for 24 hours), the initial fragrance difference was dramatic. The non-frozen sample smelled woody and stale while the frozen sample smelled almost fresh with hints of ferment, booze, and off-ness. The difference was very noticeable.
The second thing I noticed I hadn’t been expected and found quite intriguing. The non-frozen sample bag was stained brown while the frozen sample bag wasn’t stained at all. One conclusion here was that freezing the beans preserved the oils inside the bean and prevented them from leeching out. Additionally the non-frozen coffee beans were more oily to the touch than the frozen ones.
Also, the non-frozen coffee seemed to be a lighter brown than the frozen ones.
Now onto the cupping.
I set up a normal blind cupping of the 2 coffees, doing 2 samples of each in order to reduce the chance of a 1 off anomaly. After grinding the coffees and mixing up the cup locations I first started with the fragrance (or dry aroma). Again, the difference was obvious and stark. While I was cupping blindly, it was almost obvious which cups were from which sample.
Then I poured the water and checked the aroma (or wet aroma). There was an apparent difference of the crust that formed. Ironically the frozen coffee cups had a lighter brown color than the non-frozen ones (strange since the color of the non-frozen ones was lighter brown than the frozen). The frozen samples also had more of a crust form than the non-frozen samples.
After cleaning the crust off, I decided to mix up the cups once again since I thought it was obvious which was which just based on the fragrance (and I check and I was right).
Now onto tasting. At first while the coffee was at it’s warmest the difference wasn’t as stark as I thought it would be, but with a little more cooling it became obvious once again. The non-frozen samples had a real woody taste with a bit of chocolate, straw, and rancid taste. While the frozen coffees had much more zip and flavor to them, and wasn’t too bad actually (hints of berry and chocolate). It would be interesting to taste the 2 coffees blindly as filter brewed.
So overall, it seems if you are going to hold onto your coffee for almost a year before drinking (to be clear, we don't encourage this)… if you want a better and fresher tasting coffee in the end, freezing it would be a great idea. I imagine freshly roasted coffee would have a much stronger and pleasurable flavor than the older frozen coffee, but that test is pretty tough to do perfectly, without the aforementioned time machine.