Vaccumm bags and the other essential brew

Ward Chillington · Jan 20, 2025

Are there any coffee nerds out there in the BF Clubhouse that can give me a definitive answer on whether the vaccumm sealing coffee makes a difference? I started using my sealer on my bags of Timmy's as I have been buying in quantities lately and just popped this one today...it smelled great and tasted great as usual and the seal was as good as it was when I bought this batch and sealed it a

month ago.

So... is the juice worth the squeeze...or the suck in this case?

Bigbre04 · Jan 20, 2025

Honestly i dont think that vacuuming helps(but it probably doesnt hurt???). The beans off gas that is why that valve is there? I know that putting them in the freeze is not the best. Plus coffee like that(same with Dunkin donuts, choc ful o nuts, etc) is probably fairly shelf stable compared to a small batch roast.

KaijuSoul · Jan 20, 2025

coffee as a spice, this can be tricky, and i can give some advice here cause of my cooking experience. you have a lot of individual coffee strains. kind of like how brewers get so many strains of malt yeast and hops. All you really do when you vacuum seal, is keep it fresher longer, theres nothing that would make it taste or smell better besides that fact but its minute. However even when coffee loses its more pungent aroma after being opened a while it makes it no less effective as an additive.

So realistically, youre not really giving anything, and not really losing it, youre just trying to keep them as aromatic and fresh.

BarbarianBrewer · Jan 20, 2025

Like with brewing ingredients, the enemies of coffee, are heat, moisture & oxygen. So I don't see how vacuum sealing wouldn't help. I think the storage environment plus how long you need to store the beans before usage would influence how much you notice the difference. If I had a vacuum sealer I would transfer a large bag into smaller vacuum sealed bags and only have one open at a time. I kind of do that currently but with zip loc bags (minus the vacuum sealing).

Zambi · Jan 20, 2025

I think vacuum sealing keeps it good for longer.
It definitely won't do any harm

Donoroto · Jan 20, 2025

Vacuum sealing whole beans has less effect than ground. My opinion is that ground gives off a lot of its essence over time, and vacuum plus cold slows that considerably.