I freeze coffee all the time nowadays. Always sealed as tightly as can be, and always only once. Whenever I travel, I try to pick up a couple coffees from afar and take them home, and I always try to time these acquisitions for maximum freshness at the latest point in the trip, then freeze what I need to when I get home. Thing is, this strategy often causes me to pass on coffees I find early in the trip, figuring it's not worth it as they'll be too long off roast by the time I get them to my home freezer.

But now I wonder: Does quality take a hit if a fresh vac-packed coffee is frozen promptly, removed from the freezer and incidentally thawed over the course of a day's travel, and then refrozen at home, all while stored within its original vacuum seal? It sounds like a fair amount of abuse, and I would assume the travel day would, at the very least, constitute a day of degassing "rest" off roast, but... Might that be all?

I've re-frozen coffee before without much if any noticeable difference in the resulting cup. I too try and avoid freezing coffee more than once, but I know for espresso at least, I'd rather have twice frozen coffee that still has some life to it than a 3 week old shot that's got no crema.

That sounds encouraging. I guess it's time I give it a shot, so to speak.

On Weds I'm heading out to visit family in Pasadena for a week, and what tends to happen is that our hosts' patience with my espresso tourism gets used up within the first couple days, after which point I try to strike a more polite/diplomatic balance of one or two nearby shops (which now, thankfully, can include Copa Vida) and my Aeropress in their home. I often find myself in the dilemma of either seizing the moment to buy beans early on that are already a week off-roast and then hanging on to them for another few days before I can get them to my own home, or not buying beans in that moment and then risking there not being another moment, and/or (depending on cafe roast/delivery schedules) only having the same beans on the same shelf to choose from a few days later if I do make it back on the final day of the trip. Given my coffee-lust and the fact that my current home in Boise ID, this is actually a major dilemma for me!

So, this time I'll just buy whatever vac-sealed delicacies I find that happen to be no more than 3 days off-roast, freeze them immediately, travel with them later, re-freeze, and see what happens.

I wonder if there's been a professional-grade experiment on this: Blind tasting and/or comparing notes on a coffee in its prime vs. the same coffee (roasted as identically as possible) frozen, thawed, refrozen and thawed again, tasted at the theoretical equivalent duration off-roast...? For example, coffee vac-sealed within an hour off roast, opened & cupped on day 5, vs. identically roasted/sealed coffee that is frozen on day 3, thawed (still sealed) a week later, refrozen after 12 hours, kept frozen another week and then opened and cupped the next day? A convoluted study, I admit.

Yes, there is a definitive position:

Look up Ken Fox
Coffee: To Freeze or not to Freeze
on this web site, Home-Barista.com

The advice I've seen repeated in several posts here is to let the coffee thaw before opening the jar (if you're using one) or vacuum bag...with a valve bag not sure it would matter since it's not airtight. This is supposed to prevent condensation from forming on the beans, but I've never really noticed any anyway (maybe because of my climate, who knows).

There were also lot of interesting discussions here around bound vs. unbound moisture, water activity etc. I recall reading that roasted coffee has no unbound water so freezing and then re-freezing is less detrimental than it would be for say, vegetables, where the cell structure could burst from expansion. But this second-hand information I've gleaned from these forums over the past couple years and I've done no testing myself.

That being said...thinking of your post, I did an informal test over the weekend wherein I drank some coffee that had been aged to 5 days post-roast, frozen, thawed, re-frozen, then thawed again a day later. Neither I nor my wife (who has a better palate than me) noticed a difference, but we were also going from memory, not doing an A-B test.

Frank

This isn't exactly the same as freeze/thaw/freeze/thaw, but for several batches of coffee I measured the moisture in the beans that were in containers that were repeatedly taken out of the freezer and opened without thawing in order to obtain doses each day. Surprising to me there was no significant accumulation of moisture. I wouldn't assume that the same thing would be true in a very hot, humid environment. In terms of the taste there was no difference that I could detect when comparing beans from the freezer that had been exposed to air repeatedly versus beans that had been kept sealed in the freezer for a few weeks. For whatever that's worth.

kchris wrote:Yes, there is a definitive position:

Look up Ken Fox
Coffee: To Freeze or not to Freeze
on this web site, Home-Barista.com

I don't believe Ken ever specifically tested Re-freezing coffee, did he? If he did, or anyone else did I missed it.

My assumption has always been that calling it "freezing" is actually a misnomer, since there's so little moisture is roasted coffee (a couple percent? Maybe 5%?) that there really isn't any structural change in the bean when it goes in the freezer, it's just colder than room temp or in the fridge. But I suppose calling it "colding" or "cooling" is unnessarily precise?

TrlstanC wrote:My assumption has always been that calling it "freezing" is actually a misnomer, since there's so little moisture is roasted coffee (a couple percent? Maybe 5%?) that there really isn't any structural change in the bean when it goes in the freezer, it's just colder than room temp or in the fridge. But I suppose calling it "colding" or "cooling" is unnessarily precise?

I get your point that it isn't actually freezing a liquid, but it is still freezing by definition:

freeze
verb
1. (of a liquid) be turned into ice or another solid as a result of extreme cold.
"in the winter the milk froze"
2. store (something) at a very low temperature in order to preserve it.
"the cake can be frozen"

I wonder what freezing a green coffee bean would do prior to roasting. Seems like that could effect roasting parameters if there's enough moisture to rupture cell membranes.

FOR what it's worth... I posed the question about freezing coffee to the good folks at Counter Culture, and this was the response I got:

Rio,

I would definitely suggest not freezing the coffee. This will break it down prematurely, and as it is very absorbent will soak up any moisture and odors present in your freezer. The best way to keep it fresh is to simply keep it in an air-tight, cool and dry place. Even just keeping it closed up well in the original bag is better than the freezer.

Please do not hesitate to respond with any additional questions!

Best,

Jesse Gordon
Counter Culture Coffee
Web Retail Customer Representative

So if freezing is a no-no to CC, then I would imagine double freezing would be a double no-no?

I dunno. I've read so many different claims about whether to freeze...or not to freeze...that at this point I have no real opinion one way or the other.

I have stored roasted coffees for over six months in vacuum sealed bags in my chest freezer, and when I took them out they still brewed very pleasant cups. My memory isn't good enough to say whether the taste was identical to when I first placed those coffees in the freezer, but the coffee resisted staling to a remarkable degree. Even just a sealed mason jar preserves coffee very well; I've never noticed any off-tastes from that method either.

I have also refreezed some of these batches, which had been allowed to warm up to room temperature before being unsealed, to minimize condensation in Florida's moist climate. Doing it that way, refreezing was just as effective as freezing a single time.

Maybe the guy from CC has a better palate than me, and so he notices differences that I wouldn't. Or maybe they've never tested freezing methods that use best practices like vacuum sealing the beans.