In my last blog post about why coffee goes stale, I mentioned an experiment to see if keeping coffee away from oxygen would keep it fresh longer. This is part 1 of that experiment.
I chose my Chemex and a bag of Verve Coffee's Buena Vista roast. It has a Roast Date of January 31 on the bag, so it's less than 3 days old (It's early in the morning on February 2 here in Malvern, Pennsylvania). The coffee smelled excellent and the bloom was puffy and bubbly: the signature of freshly roasted beans. This is the benchmark we'll compare to in the coming weeks.
Next, the remaining beans were split into four jars, with oxygen absorbers in 3 of them. In the coming weeks, we'll open the jars and test them for freshness. Is oxygen really what is sucking the life out of my old beans? I'm going to find out!