With dominant emphasis on coffee as a fresh farm crop, I've not seen much attention to the aging of coffee. A search of this site and the web brought some useful tidbits. I chose to experiment with what I thought were seasoning greens that just happened to be well-aged, and it tastes different than the fresh crop, but it is not spoiled. The high flavor notes characteristic of origin are gone, acidity is substantially reduced, but in a pleasing way. Sweetness is preserved and the flavors are rounded and chocolatey. This conversation started on another thread, and I'll move some of that here so it can be found and discussed separately.

First, here's some of what I find about aging of coffees, and I'm not focusing here on aging in whiskey barrels to impart that flavor, but aging of the coffee itself without adding flavors. There are ways to accelerate aging, but that's not the focus here, either.

Here's an article about Caffe de L'ambre in Tokyo. I was alerted to it by participating in the La Pavoni Lever Machines group on FaceBook. Caffe de L'ambre's centenarian owner has specialized in aging of coffees for decades.

Kenneth Davids of Coffee Review writes, "Traditionally aged coffees, which are rare, may have been held in warehouses for anywhere from three to ten years, and can be superb: sweet, full almost to a fault, syrupy but clean-tasting." That is the case with the aged Yemen Moka greens I discovered I had. His article on aged coffee is here.

Here's a link to another article I like, "Aging Coffee: Is Older Better" by Lindsey Goodwin, published in The Spruce.

My next post shows my personal, successful experiment with roasting an aged coffee, following a tip by Home-Barista member EddyQ, who was experimenting with roasting a coffee with low moisture content and found that high charge temperature got a better result. Here's a link to where Ed starts testing that method.

Here's an Artisan graph of a successful roast of Yemen Moka greens that are probably about 10 years old. They were given to me as seasoning greens by H-B member rawman in late 2013 or early 2014, just after I'd gotten a North TJ-067 roaster. Other beans in his batch of seasoning greens were marked with years like 2006 and 2008.



Here's how the beans looked fresh out of the roaster.



Following are condensed tasting notes from the thread where this started. I was comparing a slower roast to the much better one above. The slow roast was lifeless. The one above is delicious. The key to roasting it well seems to be high heat in the drying phase.

"I did not get anything tasting rancid or spoiled. Dry aroma was muted. Tasted the day after roasting, and letting the ground coffee sit exposed to air for 20 minutes, it's sweet with a hint of leather that does not dominate. The aftertaste is nutty. Surprisingly the longer aftertaste has mild, spicy Yemen notes like cardamom and cumin. That's about 3 minutes after sipping at room temperature. This is contrary to what I'd read in some posts suggesting such coffees need a slow roast. That may be the case if they have low moisture. If not, faster intensifies the flavors. Moisture loss is similar for both roasts. The first is 14.5% and the second is 14.8%. The faster roast looks darker in the cup, which suggests higher extraction, although I didn't measure that."

Notes three days post-roast. "a mild, sweet, balanced espresso without flavor defects. It has some stone fruit sweetness and nutty flavor and tastes nothing like a fresh Yemen, but it is what it is. I can see why people age coffees, although I wouldn't have aged this particular one, yet aging didn't ruin it. It pulled very well updosed for a rich mouthfeel and good crema. It's now like a Brazil. A slightly hotter pull brings out a pleasant and distinctive walnut flavor."

Today, seven days post-roast, it's best pulled as a thick ristretto. It has ample crema, buttery mouthfeel, and it tastes like a bittersweet chocolate brownie. Yum! I'm going to try to roast this a bit faster and also darker and see what it's like.

How was it aged? Stored in a burlap bag with the top unsealed in my outbuilding, where it's cool, like a wine cellar. Before I had it, I don't know about storage, but whatever was done worked.

Has anyone else here successfully roasted greens that are significantly aged and were not vacuum sealed in a freezer?

No, and I respectfully (emphasis) remain a skeptic. Some of this may be in preference, taste, and palate. We all differ. Do you enjoy an aged Sumatran? To me they taste like sweat socks. I have had them numerous times and have never enjoyed them.

Aged beans from my own inventory? I bump up against them every now and then and shudder. "That's where they went." 2-6 years old. I have yet to find any of them appealing. They have, though, nourished my garden, via the work of red worms.

Noted from the Japanese shop:

"...so I made an airtight storehouse out of stainless steel, bought all the best coffee I could find, and put it in there to age. In total I aged about two tons. Some aged great, some ended up flavorless. <Emphasis mine>.

My efforts have all been flavorless, woody, flat.

Boldjava wrote:Do you enjoy an aged Sumatran? To me they taste like sweat socks. I have had them numerous times and have never enjoyed them.

In the linked Ken Davids article, he writes that "a kind of accelerated aging is now performed in Indonesia, wherein the beans are deliberately exposed to moist air, much like India's Monsooned Malabar. These aged coffees lose acidity and gain body, but they also gain a kind of hard pungency which I do not care for, but which some coffee drinkers find attractive."

I'm thinking about a coffee that's high acidity or has some overly dominant flavors and can be mellowed with controlled aging. I'm also posting this thread in part because typical advice is to roast an aged coffee very gently. The same greens roasted slowly taste lifeless. (Added: But even that batch brews nicely in a moka pot into a pleasant Americano. I find the moka pot method good for emphasizing sweetness and for concentrating mild coffees.) Not so with a fast start. Here's the unsuccessful slow roast of the same greens.



Dave, I just pulled another shot of this on my Cremina. If I were to serve it to you and ask what you think of this Brazil, I think you'd like it. If I had to choose between roasting these greens when they were fresh versus aged, of course I wouldn't recommend storing them away for 10 years. My purpose here is to explore a tradition that seems to improve some coffees by aging them -- for instance, aging intense Sumatran greens in a controlled way to see how long it takes to mellow them and integrate the flavors.

When I got my new roaster in July, I looked around the house for some old throwaway greens to use as a seasoning roast. I found 3-4 Lb. of some India Sufia robusta beans I'd bought from SM about six or more years ago to play with. I had tried it, and then put it away in a cloth SM bag in a cardboard box with other odds&ends coffees on a kitchen shelf.

So I roasted up a pound of this fairly dark, ~FC+ FC, tried it just for fun, and could not believe what I was drinking. It was spicy and sweet, and heavy bodied (of course). No burnt rubber, just very spicy and agreeable.

I only had a couple of shots from the batch. For health reasons I limit my caffeine these days, plus that was a seasoning roast, just something to burn out the roaster's manufacturing oils & all. I may need to dig that roast out and see what's what. It's old now, but the greens were too.

I'll try another roast of these just to see if all those flavors weren't the roaster's residual oils etc. from the factory.

I stumbled across this article today on deliberately aging greens. Looks like something interesting to investigate further.

Jon,

Thank you for posting that. It's another, more enthusiastic article by Kenneth Davids entitled "Aged, Casked and Cured: Innovations in Green Coffee Conditioning." A good read.

Gary,
Sorry I missed your links in your OP--good reads, and very interesting subject matter.

EDIT: Sekiguchi-San sounds amazing.

Very interesting information. Thanks for bringing this to light

This post may explain why a faster drying phase is better for my aged Yemen.

farmroast wrote:Right or wrong, the first lower temp. level chemical activity I think of managing is water activity, then as approaching 300f lipids/oils activity gets going, sort of going from primarily steaming/boiling to primarily roasting. During transition energy demands shifting the types of chemical reactions. Drying might not be the best term but there is a desire to head into the roasting phase with a preferable amount of water remaining. RoR reactions during the transition "may" have an indication of amount of maintained moisture, at least at the extremes.