Sounds like your meter is probably pretty accurate, billc, since, presumably, most of the coffee you buy should be between 9% and 12%.
If it seemed an interesting thing to do, it is fairly simple to verify the accuracy of your meters using the ICO reference for determining coffee bean moisture content. Take a weighed sample of some beans you’ve measured with your meter. Bake them in a convection oven for 24 hours at 220° F and weigh again. Divide dry weight by “wet” weight and multiply by 100 - et voila!
Interesting. I am assuming a larger sample would give better accuracy.
I will try that when it cools off a little. It is supposed to be 101F today and I don’t want to run my convection oven for 24 hours and add more heat to the house.
Larger sample size should yield better accuracy - not sure you could get any meaningful data out of drying one bean! Larger sample size also reduces the error caused by accuracy/resolution of your scale.
If your sample size were 100g, you’d be spared any unpleasant division to get the answer.
Good call on waiting for cooler times to do the experiment - intellectual curiosity has its limits!
Cool and misty in Portland (Oregon), today. Need to roast some coffee for the labor day weekend camping trip.
I don’t want to open a can of worms (well, maybe I do) but I recently saw this thread on Home Barista about steaming your green before you roast it. (Is there no end to the tweaking we will do for better coffee?)
I have not tried it yet, but this paper is a pretty good start.
I hope to retire in the next six months or so and will have much more time to experiment. But it looks very interesting to me.
Thanks. From your subsequent responses “below”, it seems the way you are using it to essentially compare lots relative to each other, means the absolute value is not particularly important. Makes sense to me.
On a completely different subject, I too am looking to retire soon (after 40 yrs in Aviation). I have no interest in ruining my roasting hobby by trying to go full-tilt-boogie and starting a roasting business, but if my neighbors wanna buy some, that’d work!
Well, I was buying some coffees these days, and let me tell you the listings are no joke to go through. They are practically infinite. There’s specialty coffee everywhere you look. It’s really hard to choose these days. But that’s beside the point. What I wanted to say was that I ran into old coffees regularly, and they had excellent prices. Evon those from 2021. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but the listings had the crop year and moisture content. The oldest one I’ve fouind was some Guatemala from 2014 with 10.8% moisture content. It was 4€ per kg, so it still has some value. Anyway, I did run into fresh crop coffees with 9.5 % moisture content, but that depends on something else. The point is, if you’re storing your coffee correctly, it can last a long time. If you’re not paying attention, it can last a very short time indeed. I can’t imagine the coffee from 2014 being stored in a freezer all that time. It just wouldn’t be right.
I believe the ICO recommendation is that green coffee be stored at a relative humidity between 40% and 60%. Presumably this assumes storage in burlap. Fortunately, most of Europe and the US falls within this range for most of the year. (Exceptions, of course!)
So, I think the takeaway is that in most parts of Europe and the US, green coffee will maintain its correct moisture content for an extended period without exceptional measures. (Exceptions, of course!)
It would be interesting to investigate the affect of “aging” on green coffee. Not quite sure how you could pull off a double blind taste test with the same coffee, both recently harvested and a few years old!
But, if you are finding “mature” coffee at a quarter the price of young coffee, it is certainly worth exploring. There’s nothing to say that the changes wrought by time on green coffee are necessarily negative.
Not necessarily advice, but I’ve heard of preppers storing mass amounts of green coffee in vacuum sealed bags or using silica gel packets. The idea is that water, salt, sugar, flour, and coffee will be the hot commodities and they would have bargaining power if the stuff hits the fan…
That said, I’ve got some beans from about 2 years ago that I would roast for myself, but not sell or give to others. (Sometimes they actually turn out great.) There’s a case to be made for not wasting, but setting lower expectations.
I would try to keep them less than 3 months, generally speaking, unless you have a long term storage plan. If you can’t keep up with the volume you have on hand, throw some into cold storage, whatever method you decide on.
Please do not throw anything other than small bags of coffee into cold storage, if you don’t own a professional level of frozen storage. Also, put it either in a ziplock freezer bag or in a vacuum bag. As mentioned before, the best way for storing coffee for long periods of time is ambient temp and humidity, provided you’re not in a desert or a monsoon. And why wouldn’t you sell 2 year old coffee? That’s pretty fresh. Just one year in storage. It is absolutely impossible that the coffee lost something perceptible, or anything for that matter, if it was stored properly. But, if you keep beans for 3 months, that would make your coffee about a year and a half old, maybe less maybe more. What difference can 6 months make?
Yeah, did that. I could nitpick, being trained and all, but a non trained customer wouldn’t notice. It’s also questionable if I notice or it’s just subjective. I’d say that it’s subjective, and that you must free yourself from prejudice by blind testing. Completely blind. I mean, not even knowing that one was stored longer than the other. Then you’ll see that there’s not much difference, if any. But that isn’t possible. We must carry a bit of prejudice. The right thing to do is to always inform your customer and adjust your price accordingly, because the importer gave you a past crop discount. These discounts are more based on storage reasons rather than quality. The importer always gets new coffee and can’t wait years to get the profit he wants. In conclusion, 2021 crop, go for it. You get great coffee at a great price. I have cupped various 2021 coffes when they got here in 2022, and now. I repeat, I could nitpick, but there’s not much there. Also, you can’t really confront it with the new crop. Yes, it’s the same plant, same farm, same process, but the meteorological conditions weren’t the same. It’s just like wine. George Howell even had the idea of freezing coffee from a good year. It’s a good idea if you have frozen storage capacities as those, but not many have them. I mean, how many people can get a pallet delivered and store it in a freezer?
