Does keeping coffee in the fridge preserve its flavour?

The Star

10-07-2025

Coffee's aroma is a bit like a moody teenager. It's highly sensitive to its environment and quick to react to just anything around it. It also has a habit of disappearing before you can even begin to do anything with it.
For this reason, coffee - whether beans and or freshly ground - needs special treatment, just like any pubescent housemates.
The worst enemies of coffee are light, moisture, air and heat. For this reason, you may have heard people suggesting to keep coffee in the fridge - about as dark and cool a place as you can get at home.
But coffee experts are generally in agreement that this does little to help stop your coffee from going stale. In fact it may even make it taste bad faster.
"Coffee absorbs foreign odours very quickly. If you store it near some cheese, leeks or other strongly scented foods, it loses its aroma," says Andrea Danitschek, a food scientist and consumer awareness worker in Germany.
The biggest problem occurs when you start taking coffee out every day for your caffeine hit. That's when large temperature differences between warm room air and the refrigerator-cold coffee start to create one of coffee's worst enemies: water (as condensation). Best-case scenario, you're losing flavour. Worst-case, you're even causing mould to develop.
So if you're planning to use up your coffee in a week or two, it's best to store it in a cool pantry or cupboard somewhere instead.
But while the fridge is a bad idea, the freezer can be helpful in slowing the staling process, as coffee influencer and world barista champion James Hoffmann says.
"Most domestic freezers live at about minus 20 degrees Celsius," he says in an advice video to coffee makers. "That's good enough to help slow the process quite dramatically."
Again, the same problem occurs if you want to open the freezer container with the coffee in it and, in doing so, let in warm air, causing condensation.
That means that freezing coffee is best as a long-term solution, say if you've bought too much coffee, and not as a day-to-day storage place.
In any case, coffee should always be kept in an air-tight container that doesn't let any light in and won't shed any smell into the coffee. In an air-tight container in the freezer, beans can hold onto their aroma for months, while at room temperature it tends to go stale after just days, especially if air can get at it.
Some coffee drinkers use special air-tight containers said to help the coffee maintain its aroma even longer by pumping the air out and creating a vacuum around the beans.
Finally, any barista will tell you the most important step you can take to preserving aroma is to buy whole beans and freshly grind them every time before making your coffee. – dpa