This sentiment appears frequently herein :

Either way, it is not recommended to refreeze already frozen beans. It goes stale faster that way.

Don't refreeze if you can avoid it.

Just let them thaw completely before you open them and don't refreeze.

ever the contrarian

cafeIKE wrote:I often buy 3 to 5 kilos at a time in 1kg bags. If the bags are mylar or heavy duty plastic, simply tape over the 1-way valve and freeze.

1 bag goes into 125g jars. Remove a jar or two every couple of days, depending on usage. When the jars need refilling, simply defrost 1 bag over night, fill the jars and refreeze. from Photos of two shots 24 hours... BIG difference.

For the past several months, daily usage has hovered around 45g or a little over a couple days for each 125g jar.

As a 'speriment, when I ran out of 125g jars, a larger quantity was defrosted for a few hours, put into 125g jars and alternately refrozen or kept at room temperature. Over several coffees from light to dark, blend and SO, without fail, the refrozen coffee performed better. There was no need to up the dose as with the room temperature coffee that staled over the 3 to 7+ extra days. Sniff test of refrozen relative to its room temperature predecessor showed much less change than room temperature to frozen.

The difference is particularly noticeable toward the end of the local useful freezer life of a couple of months.

This is interesting. Sorry to ask this, but Ike, could you explain the compared sequences again? I got a little lost. For example, Coffee "A" was roasted when, stored how long at room temperature, frozen when, thawed when, refrozen when, re-thawed when, brewed when? Then the same for the "control" Coffee "B." I wasn't quite sure which sequence was being compared to what. Thanks.

It seems that the long-standing rule of never freezing coffee has been pretty well debunked in these pages. It's not just that 30-day old beans are better at that age if 20 of those days were spent frozen, but (given theoretically identical beans) that batch will be close to indistinguishable from a 10-day old never-frozen batch.

So if that's true, then absent some clear evidence of a mechanism that changes a coffee bean so that, once frozen and thawed, its freeze-ability is somehow "used up," then Ike's finding is completely logical. Do we know anything to the contrary, or has the re-freezing admonition been an example of us all repeating the same apocryphal experience without trying the assumption?

My recommendations for not re-freezing come from those who might have the tendency to open the beans while some of them are still below the dew point and would have water condense on them. I don't have any evidence that freezing "wet" beans is bad, but it doesn't seem good to me if it can be avoided.

I also don't have any evidence that temperature cycling the beans between freezer and room temperature, in and of itself, causes significant, additional degradation.

So, based on the potential for damage and the relative ease of portioning before freezing, that is the path I take. Then again, if one has a nice CO2 blanket in the bag, opening it and exposing the beans to oxygen, even in the freezer, might have an effect.

Anvan wrote:This is interesting. Sorry to ask this, but Ike, could you explain the compared sequences again? I got a little lost.

Assume a coffee 4 days rested. Remove 1# from freezer and put into 4 125g jars. Add ~1 day for defrost.
Age of the coffee stored at room temperature vs the refrozen coffee @ ~45g/day

Jeff wrote:...the relative ease of portioning before freezing...

It's a storage volume issue. 6# fit nicely in an USPS medium Priority Mail box.
Roasted whole bean coffee is about .36g/cm³
6# is about 2.5 liters

It takes ~22 125g jars for 6#. With best packing (.9069), 22 jars take about 14.5 liters, a 6x increase.

The missus loves her latte, but not at the expense of her Canadian Butter.