We have been utilising freezer storage for a little while now in both our cafes and roastery. In the cafes, it means individually dosing roasted coffee ready to be picked out of the freezer and ground and brewed to order. For the roastery, it means freezing green coffee to prolong its quality and then removing the green coffee to roast it when the time comes.
Freezing coffee has become a more and more utilised tool in specialty coffee. Obviously freezing food and drink is a long established approach, however it was not overly present in specialty coffee until the mid 2010s. George Howell based in Boston, US has long been a pioneer in coffee and started freezing green coffee as a way to preserve quality over time. Famously, this was powerfully displayed in a barista competition when one of George’s Kenyan coffees was used with the older harvest displaying better cup quality than the new harvest. This was powerful, as we generally work with coffee as a seasonal fresh crop, expecting quality to drop off relatively quickly.
More and more roasting companies have started utilising frozen green storage, especially for really expensive smaller lots. It means you can run a “cellar” of frozen green coffee that can be utilised as a menu to be selected from over time. We have introduced a freezer menu on our wholesale website that allows our partners to select from frozen green coffee stock to be roasted to order.
There are still unknowns around frozen coffee. I am still slightly confused by the results of some of the green coffee storage. There is a limit on how long freezing will likely hold quality, not one we know for sure. However, what is more curious is how the coffee can change in the freezer. Sometimes I prefer the coffee after it's been in a freezer as green coffee for a year in comparison to the fresh coffee. Others have started suggesting simple maths for how the roasted coffee may still age even if at a greatly reduced rate. I.e. that freezing roasted coffee one week from roast will not be fully “stopped in time” but rather will continue to age at a greatly reduced rate. As with all coffees, it's complex and there is still much that we are all discovering, but we also adopt processes and techniques that repeatedly display value. Freezing is proving to be one of those techniques.
Best,
Maxwell
WELCOME TO COLONNA
×
Looking to shop in US Dollars? Please visit our Colonna US store. All orders are processed and shipped from our UK roastery.