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Transcript below.
Topic: Green coffee freshness and crop cycles.
Coffee Smarter Expert: Jared Hales, Hacea Coffee Source
Connect: www.haceacoffee.com • @haceacoffeesource on Instagram
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Store green coffee separated from oxygen in a cool dark place.
Green coffee can take on tastes from the burlap or jute bags they are shipped in unless they are stored in a protective liner to protect the beans against humidity and temperature changes.
GrainPro is like the Kleenex of bag brands. Their name is synonymous with protective coffee bag liners.
Larger bags are sealed with zip ties. Smaller bags (>20kg) may have zipper enclosures. Homeroasters could even use Ziploc bags for smaller quantities.
Keep coffee off the ground, especially if the flooring is concrete which can hold heat even if the sun isn’t directly shining on it. Concrete also pulls ambient heat from the air.
Green coffee acts kind of like a sponge, absorbing odors and flavors of what it is stored near.
Avoid extremes and extreme swings!
Full interview dialogue below.
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INTERVIEW*
R!WC: Jared Hales of Hacea Coffee Source, welcome back! I always appreciate you coming and chatting with us here at Roast! West Coast about green coffee because it's something I know nothing about, really. Other than it eventually becomes brown coffee that I then brew.
We have a really cool chat for today. Welcome [everyone]. This is the green coffee column presented by Hacea Coffee Source. What am I learning about today?
Jared: So, to jump off from what we were talking about last time with coffee freshness, I want to share a little bit of what I know about coffee storage.
R!WC: I bought coffee. What am I going to do with it? I bought these big, giant bags of coffee. You know, if I'm a commercial roaster or even a small amount, if I'm a home roaster, I want to make sure I don't eff it up.
Jared: Right, and we're talking about green coffee still here. Not roasted coffee, which we could probably spend more than 10 minutes talking about. But talking about storing green coffee specifically, there are a few key points when you're looking to store whatever green coffee you bought besides knowing when the coffee was processed and arrived in the US.
You really want to store coffee separated from oxygen. So historically, coffee was actually shipped in just like jute or burlap bags, and if you taste coffee that has been shipped this way and stored this way, it pretty rapidly takes on a certain taste that tastes a lot like the smell of jute or burlap.
You could probably lick the burlap and get a similar taste, but I'm not advising that. So, right off the bat, with specialty green coffees, we almost always ship these with a protective liner inside of the jute bags. This is specifically like a grain protective liner that protects against humidity and temperature changes.
R!WC: How long have these bags been around?
Jared: I'm not sure who was the first to use it or anything like that. It was before my time and coffee. I started in coffee in 2008, but the industry standard for these liners comes from GrainPro. That's the company that makes the liners, and they started in 1992.
Their product is kind of synonymous with a bag liner. So you may describe any bag liner as a GrainPro liner, even though it may not be GrainPro brand. Kind of like Vice-Grip, right? Like, they were early to do it and have become super good at it. So, any bag, any competitor, gets lumped into GrainPro, even though that may not be the brand.
R!WC: I don't buy a tissue. I buy a Kleenex.
Jared: Exactly, exactly. So, it has been around for a little while. And the demand for specialty [coffee] has definitely pushed the demand for these liners as well. What these liners do, as I mentioned, is they protect the coffee from basically outside elements like oxygen, humidity, and temperature change.
R!WC: Are these sealed, or are they not vacuum sealed,
Jared: They're typically just sealed by hand with a zip tie. So, ideally, oxygen is pushed out. Then, they're sealed with a zip tie to prevent oxygen from coming back in. Some have like a zipper closure, which we actually use on our 20-kilo bags. They're not super effective in the larger weights, but they work really well in the smaller sizes.
That's an advantage that a home roaster might have is that they could put their green coffee into an actual Ziploc bag or something that is airtight. If you're storing larger volumes, like in a commercial roastery, it's probably best just to reseal the GrainPro liner with a zip tie.
So, aside from that, you want to keep your coffee in a pretty stable environment. So that you're not unnecessarily introducing it to big shifts in humidity or temperature. That kind of has a few prongs to it, right?
Climate control [is important] if you live in, or if you're storing coffee in, an area that has these big swings naturally. California is pretty mellow, right. Fortunately, we don't have to worry too much about—this in California specifically. Because our temperature is always 50 to 90 [degrees], it is a pretty tight range. Humidity is pretty tight in California. Let's say like 40-70% humidity here.
R!WC: As someone who is proudly from the Midwest but identifies as a Californian at this point, I would argue that anything outside of 68-72 is ridiculous.
Jared: Ha ha ha. Well, it's a good thing that it's in that range, like 90% of the time! If you're not blessed with California weather, then you may want to control the environment that the coffee is being stored in.
For example, inside of an office or something like that with heating and cooling. Then, kind of in that same line of thinking, you ideally want to keep the coffee off the ground not only for a lot of health code reasons but also the temperature on the ground, the actual flooring. In most warehouses, the floor is concrete. Usually, the concrete feels the temperature changes faster than the air. Is that right? I don't know if that's...
R!WC: That sounds right.
Jared: The concrete can also change the temperature of the coffee where the coffee is touching the concrete. So you want to keep it off the ground for food safety reasons as well as you know that temperature change in the concrete or in the floor.
Obviously, you want to keep the coffee, the green coffee, away from water. So you know we're not keeping our green coffee right next to our three-compartment sink in the kitchen. Right? We're not splashing water on our green coffee.
Green coffee actually acts a lot like a sponge with whatever it's around. As I mentioned, with the jute flavors and without the liner, green coffee can absorb the odors of whatever it's been stored near. This becomes an issue with shipping sometimes, where the coffee may have accidentally been shipped next to a pallet of tires, right? Now, this coffee tastes kind of like rubber tires. Again, that liner can protect against that. But even still, the coffee can absorb some of that odor into itself. So it's really important that you keep the coffee away from anything with a strong smell.
R!WC: So it sounds to me like—just trying to figure out all the logistics, but controlling the environment is a key factor. There's going to be a range where things are relatively safe, and it's a pretty big range. But you don't want to be swinging outside of that one way, either too high or too low. And I'm assuming that applies to humidity as well.
Jared: Exactly. Yeah. So, all things in moderation, right? You just want to avoid any extremes. And any extreme swings, like going from high to low very quickly, can also have an impact on the green coffee itself. And essentially, we're just trying to keep this seat alive to preserve its shelf life and quality.
R!WC: You mentioned that you wouldn't want to leave a green coffee bag lying on the ground, like on the concrete, because the temperature of the floor will be different from the temperature of the air. Does that also apply to stacking bags?
Jared: Oh, that's a good question. So I've noticed, I have seen instances where bags that are, for example, stacked too close to a wall may have some variation within that stack.
But when we're talking about stacking, I think what you're getting at...the stacks can be pretty huge before any issues occur. And most roasters are just stacking pallets. So there's always air around at least three sides of the coffee.
I haven't seen any issues with stacking in the U.S. The problem happens more often in the dry mills—at origin, where these mountains of coffee are stacked up. Sometimes, the center of that mountain may not get the proper airflow that it needs.
R!WC: This is just a personal question because I'm curious. I know you have a warehouse in Anaheim. What would you say is the most coffee you've had in there at one given time that you're trying to move out? I'm assuming there are times of the year when it's pretty full and other times when it's pretty empty.
Jared: Yeah, so our warehouse is pretty small. It's really intentional. It is the intention of our warehouse to serve local roasters who want to pick up as well as accommodating smaller roasters who need the coffee sacks broken down into smaller increments. Our warehouse currently, which is overfilled, can accommodate close to 200 bags of coffee. But you know, our third-party warehouse partners can hold many containers for us.
R!WC: That's actually a really nice, I think. It's kind of a customer service thing that you have that. It's not a retail space but a place for a local roaster to go and actually see and learn and touch, but at the same time, accommodate them as they grow.
Jared: Exactly. And that's exactly what the intention of it was. So most of our competitors or other coffee importers store in third-party warehouses. We do as well, but we refill our own warehouse so that we can be flexible and accommodate roasters of different sizes with different needs.
R!WC: Very cool. Anything about storage, any other tips or tidbits that we missed?
Jared: Basically, keep your green coffee stored in a cool, dark place like you would your roasted coffee—airtight if possible, and without being exposed to too extreme temperatures or humidities.
R!WC: I know we were chatting about some pretty technical things, but without using very specific numbers and data and charts and graphs and things but I think you mentioned you are going to work on compiling a few of those to share on haceacoffee.com. So look for that if you're reading or listening [to this]. And Jared, thank you for coming back and doing a little more green coffee education with us.
Jared: Thank you.
*This transcription has been edited for length and clarity.
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