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I know that freshly roasted coffee needs to rest at least a few days before drinking because carbon dioxide is being released from the freshly roasted beans. At the same time, excess exposure to oxygen will cause coffee to go stale quickly. Commercial roasters have packaging machinery that sucks the air out of the bag and puts coffee beans under vacuum for storage. The packages usually have a small vent hole to release carbon dioxide without allowing outside air into the bag.

My question is if there is a way to duplicate that storage idea without spending a lot of money on commercial packaging equipment? I would like to be able to store my freshly roasted coffee without fear of it going stale too quickly.

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Yes, there is a way to store freshly roasted coffee - or even store bought roasted beans - at home under vacuum without expensive equipment. I drink wine and have collected a couple of wine storage devices over the years that I no longer use. One of these is a bottle stopper with a one-way valve in the top and a vacuum pump for removing the air from a partially consumed bottle of wine.

My idea was to clean out the bottle and fill it with freshly roasted coffee beans, then use the vacuum pump and stopper to apply suction to the bottle to encourage the carbon dioxide to exit the beans without worrying about oxygen making the beans go stale prematurely.

I've found that the beans emit enough carbon dioxide gas to require re-pumping the bottle for the first day or two, but after that it will hold a vacuum indefinitely. I've added erasable labels to the bottle to record the type of roasted beans I have inside. Two standard wine bottles will hold about 610 grams of roasted beans, or about 700 grams of unroasted beans, which is 7 batches in my SR 500 roaster. These are Ethiopian, YMMV.

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  • Seems like a valid method. Nice thought.
    – MTSan
    Commented Jun 14, 2016 at 11:16
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Wine bottles work for me too. We buy 3kg bags and funnel the bulk of the beans into three wine bottles. The dark bottles minimize light on the beans, too

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