About a year ago, we started putting a good portion of our green coffee into air tight mylar bags. We were sick of coffees losing character and liveliness after a few months, and we knew getting them out of burlap was one of the best things we could do to prevent this. We're now doing it with all of our coffees. We go through each lot pretty quick, usually within about four months, but the bags still make a tremendous difference.

On July 18th of '08, I bagged up some coffee for an experiment. I took our Guatemala Finca Agua Tibia, and stored a sample sized amount three different ways. First, I put a half pound in a cloth drawstring bag, along with a piece of a coffee bag, to simulate traditional storage in jute. A second sample was stored in an air tight bag. Both of these went into the bottom drawer of our file cabinet.

The third sample was sealed in a mylar bag, and placed in my freezer at home. Freezing is a great way to keep green coffee fresh for an extended period of time, and at least one roaster (Terroir Coffee) has used it on a large scale with great success. So far, we've tried to embrace the seasonal nature of certain coffees, but if we found ourselves wanting to offer a special coffee for an extended period of time (more than four months), it would be great to know if freezing lives up to its reputation.

The initial plan was to come back to these samples after a year, but I'm getting anxious. One of our baristas also just got a sample of the current crop from Finca Agua Tibia, and we now have the opportunity for a vertical tasting (same coffee, different harvest year) as well. So... I think I'll be roasting them sometime this week, and a fun cupping will follow shortly.

I've never set up a cupping aimed only at tasting the impact of various storage methods, and the vertical tasting should be very interesting as well, assuming the freezer did what it's supposed to do. I'm excited for this one.

I'll follow up with the results next week.

-Jon