Coffee Bean Freshness

If you are Cape Town or Johannesburg based we offer tongue tingling coffee delivered to you home or office. Order from our order form we will deliver.

  • For Cape Town we normally are bulk roast is on Tuesday, delivery Wednesday. We do a top up roast on Thursday and deliver Thursday afternoon or Friday morning
  • For Johannesburg we roast Friday, deliver to our agent Monday, so it you should get the coffee by Wednesday

The freshness of the coffee bean is one of the most important features of a great cup of java, coffee, espresso, latte or cappuccino.

Fresh espresso

Once coffee is removed from the roaster it starts losing flavour within minutes of cooling. Hopefully it has not been spraid with water to cool, if so freezing or cooling is out of the question. Ideally you should drink coffee within 2 days of it being roasted. However seems as most coffee lovers do not own a roaster what are the alternatives?

Coffee is only considered fresh for the first 2 weeks. After that the taste becomes duller and duller.

Freezing - Does it help?

First you need to determine if coffee is correctly roasted. This means that the oils are retained in the roasted bean. Then the bean must be gently air cooled as it comes out of the roaster, like for example our coffee.

Then at this point coffee is roasted and cooled to the point that best exposes the flavour and oils are in tacked then coffee can be frozen.

We have do our own tests on our own coffee but you can also read the Frequently Asked Questions which will detail other independant studies

We have found that resting the coffee for about 4 hours before freezing gives the best results for our coffee.

How then does a coffee drinker ensure that the coffee he or she drinks still has a fresh flavour? Research and personal testing has shown that if you store the beans in the freezer you can extend their freshness for up to 2 months. Let me state that clearly without freezing the freshness is more or less intact for up to 2 weeks, with freezing the bean can remain fresh for 2 months.

A Quaffee we freeze all our coffee beans a few hours after being roasted. That said we do not sell or deliver any of our coffee 8 days after it has been roasted, even if it has been in the freezer.

We therefore carefully control our stock levels to ensure that the coffees we roast are delivered to our clients within the first week after roasting.

More on freshness

Ground Coffee or Coffee Grinds

Once coffee is ground it starts loosing its freshness immediately. Ground coffee will lose at least 50% of its flavour within the first 3 hrs after being ground.

Freezing or vacuum packing has little effect on the delay of this process. Best case it will delay it by 30 hours.

Rubbish I hear you say, what about all those coffee companies that vacuum pack and freeze dry etc. The proof is in the tasting. We find that once a coffee drinker has drunk our fresh handpicked mountain grown coffee they too can taste the difference

Managing you freshness

If your coffee machine is serviced by us, we manage the freshness with and for you. We look at your consumption and your facilities (i.e. do you have a freezer) and adjust the supply accordingly. We deliver coffee to match your consumption. and that typically means that for most our clients that is once a week.

We can also do this if you own your own coffee machine. We can work with you to ensure that the coffee is fresh when you drink it. Once you have found the fresh taste you will find it almost impossible to stomach the poorer quality and stale coffees that represent the majority of the market today