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If it's recommended that coffee should be stored in an air tight container then why do coffee bags have an aroma hole.
Apart from being able to smell the coffee is there another purpose to this? I would've thought that it would be better to not have a hole at all and that it should be air tight.
It seems the hole at the bottom is probably for degassing but I have seen on some packages that they call this an aroma hole.
It's actually a one-way valve & it's critical to the shelf life of the coffee and the preservation of the bag itself.
When coffee is fresh roasted, it releases carbon dioxide. It's basically a by-product of the roasting process. When the coffee is ground, carbon dioxide is released expeditiously. If you simply place fresh roasted coffee in a completely sealed bag, the bag will expand and in most cases rupture.
http://beanfruit.com/blogs/news/15152773-whats-that-thing-on-my-coffee-bag
Its nothing but a marketing gimmick, enabling the user to use the degassing ventilation hole as aroma hole. If the coffee is super fresh you will be smelling a very bad gas while squeezing the coffee bag, but this is rarely the case as many consumer coffee products have been laying in the shelfs for more than one week.
If I can smell coffee coming from the pack I don't buy it, the packs on the shelf in the shop often look badly handled or even crushed. From experience I find these have lost flavour when I get them home. For a while now I've been buying Lavazza ground coffee which is vacuum packed and providing that the pack is hard like a brick, it never fails to keep fresh. I don't understand why all ground coffee can't be sold this way.
