Coffee storage tips — Tropix Barista Paradise

Tip 3/3

GRIND YOUR BEANS

This is important for 2 reasons: preserving coffee aromas and adjusting grind size.

All coffee in the world, and especially “Specialty Coffee” has been carefully cultivated, often hand-picked, processed and sorted to ensure the best quality possible. After this long coffee production process, with many hands involved, our responsibility as coffee professionals, home baristas and coffee lovers lies in the preservation of these delicate aromas.
This way we pay our respects towards this beautiful black gold, coffee and to everyone involved in the production process. 🖤

— Preserving coffee aromas

As soon as you open a package of ground coffee, a wonderful aroma spreads. These aromas quickly evaporate in the air, impossible to capture them in your cup of coffee. Ground coffee ages faster due to this loss of aromas and flavours. This means that day by day your package of ground coffee loses more and more aroma. In addition to that, your ground coffee will develop old, stale coffee aromas due to oxidation. Double loss! By grinding only the amount of coffee beans that you need at that moment, you will brew a more aromatic cup of coffee. This additional small step in your daily coffee routine will make a big difference.

— Why adjust your grind size?

This topic deserves a separate blog post, but here I will give you a short explanation. Every brewing method requires a different grind size, due to desired extraction time, which has a big effect on the final coffee flavour.

In short, we distinguish 3 grind sizes for 3 collections of brewing methods:

fine grind size: for espresso coffee (espressomachine, ibrik, mokapot)
medium grind: for filter coffee (drip machines, pour-overs)
course grind: for full emersion methods (French press, vacuum pot, syphon)

These grind sizes described above are just general indicators, there are many nuances, a lot of fine-tuning and also exceptions. Grind size is just one of the many parameters that affect your coffee brew, and therefore your coffee flavour. Working with all the parameters during brewing is the fun part of preparing coffee. Well at least for coffee professionals and baristas ;)

— Don’t have a grinder at home (yet)?

Ask your coffee roaster or specialty coffee bar to grind your beans for your brewing method at home. At least the grind size will be close to the ideal grind size for your brewing method. Coffee that’s already grinned and for sale on the shop selves, never have an ideal grind size. It’s just impossible to have a grind size that fits all brewing methods and recipes.

Only buy a minimum amount of coffee (like 250gr) that you can use in a reusable time span. this way you can brew at least “fresh” coffee at home (see our previous post on roast date).