Vacuum sealers for coffee - Page 3

Discuss flavors, brew temperatures, blending, and cupping notes.
stahlee
Posts: 85
Joined: 14 years ago

#21: Post by stahlee »

I also use a VacMaster VP120 that I've had for 3 years. I'm lucky since I have the model that still had the accessory port to seal jars and canisters. The new VP120S doesn't have the accessory port anymore. Anyway, the advantage of buying one of these more commercial units is they can run 24/7. Before we moved to Austin, we lived in PA and had 5 large gardens. We would freeze a lot of the vegetables. I mean I would be bringing buckets of veggies in every day. I destroyed a couple FoodSavers. I'll vacuum seal my jars of beans before going in the freezer. I vacuum seal everything. I have thousands of bags in different sizes because they are so cheap. About once a year we order more. I use it for veggies, meats, sous vide, quick pickling and so on. There are so many uses for vacuum sealing. For instance, make some guacamole and vacuum seal what you don't eat. It will last a week or two easily.

jpender
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Joined: 11 years ago

#22: Post by jpender »

jpender wrote:I had a hard time telling the difference between those four cups. I knew two of them were vac-sealed and expected those to be slightly better in terms of aroma or lack of staleness, or something. I eventually picked the two cups that I thought were marginally better. They turned out to both be the non-vac-sealed samples. Probably just random chance.
I repeated this and once again I chose both of the non-vac-sealed coffees as my favorites. Again the differences were so minor as to border on imaginary, but I believe the odds of this happening twice by chance alone are 1 in 36. So now I'm starting to wonder.

Could vacuum sealing this coffee have actually made it worse?


Edit (10Feb): I blind tasted this coffee two more times, once as two Aeropress brews and once as two Brikka Americanos. While the differences in these cups was very subtle, I again chose the freezer bag samples as my preference in both cases. The odds of continually selecting those by chance alone are 1 in 144.

Edit (19 May 2017): I took the remaining samples out of the freezer (6 months post roast) and blind tasted them. This time my preferred choices were more evenly split between vacuum bag and freezer bag stored coffee beans. But the truth is, they tasted virtually identical to me. The same was true 3 months ago as well. I think that 1 in 144 aren't really that long as far as odds go. It's like rolling snake eyes and then flipping two coins and having them both come up heads. Not particularly likely but not so amazingly unlikely as to prove the dice and coins are loaded either. Anyway, bottom line from this test is that the vacuum bags did not preserve this coffee any better than the ziplock freezer bags, at least not enough so that I could discriminate between them. For what it's worth.

jefflovescoffee
Posts: 2
Joined: 7 years ago

#23: Post by jefflovescoffee »

A chamber vacuum sealer is the way to go. This article talks about the enemies of coffee and how using a vacuum sealer is great for keeping coffee fresh. https://www.vacmasterfresh.com/fresh-bi ... vacmaster/

The suction sealers suck all the air out of the bag vs. the chamber vacuum sealers, a little more expensive, remove air from the entire chamber leaving the air pressure equal both inside and outside the bag which is better for keeping coffee, meats, or liquids fresh longer. https://www.vacmasterfresh.com/vacuum-sealers/

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JohnB.
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#24: Post by JohnB. »

jefflovescoffee wrote: The suction sealers suck all the air out of the bag vs. the chamber vacuum sealers, a little more expensive, remove air from the entire chamber leaving the air pressure equal both inside and outside the bag which is better for keeping coffee, meats, or liquids fresh longer.
Suction or chamber both methods remove the air. The chamber method seems to be better if there are liquids as it won't pull them out of the bag but it isn't going to keep coffee any fresher then the suction method.
LMWDP 267

jpender
Posts: 3863
Joined: 11 years ago

#25: Post by jpender »

jefflovescoffee wrote:A chamber vacuum sealer is the way to go. This article talks about the enemies of coffee and how using a vacuum sealer is great for keeping coffee fresh. https://www.vacmasterfresh.com/fresh-bi ... vacmaster/
An article on the web site for VacMaster, a company that sells vacuum sealers.

nuketopia
Posts: 1305
Joined: 8 years ago

#26: Post by nuketopia »

The Food Saver I have pulls a vacuum equivalent to an altitude of about 20,000 - 21,000 feet. It's like freezing stuff on a high mountain. It does help reduce moisture and oxygen content.

Illy packs coffee in slightly higher than sea level nitrogen and calls it shelf stable. It mostly works. I don't think it works as long as Illy does, but I've certainly pulled Illy from a can and it wasn't bad.

jpender
Posts: 3863
Joined: 11 years ago

#27: Post by jpender »

Using a cheap Food Saver I vacuum bag sealed a small pressure sensor (along with some coffee beans). It was interesting to see the vacuum slip a little bit from its peak value when the unit switched from vacuuming to sealing. Once sealed the pressure read 28.4kPa. I live at sea level which means that's a 21inHg vacuum and is roughly equivalent to the air pressure at 31,000 feet.

So the air density is a little less than 1/3 normal. And the vac sealer reduces the void space (as compared to a tightly wrapped bag or a jar) which means that all told there is about 20% as much air as in a full, non-vacuumed container. But that also means there's still a lot of air in there. So the question is, how does the rate of deterioration relate to available oxygen? How does it change with temperature?

As for moisture, I don't think it makes a difference. At room temperature, the moisture content of air (even when saturated) is negligible in the context of a closed container filled with coffee beans.

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