Coffee Degassing: Why Fresher Isn’t Always Better

What Coffee Degassing Means For Your Coffee

Feeling a little gassy today? So is your coffee. After being roasted, coffee goes through a process called degassing. While it lends its way to a nice dad joke, it’s actually the reason why the freshest coffee isn’t always the best coffee. Let’s look at degassing and what it means for your coffee.

What is Coffee Degassing?

The roasting process causes a lot of chemical changes to the coffee bean itself. During roasting, gases including CO2 build up inside the coffee and then will leak out over the course of the following days. During this degassing, the coffee bean is extremely volatile, making for uneven and less than desirable extractions. This is the reason why good coffee shops wait a few days before bringing roasted beans to the bar. Also, if you’ve ever noticed a little valve on your retail coffee bag where you might have taken a sniff of the beans inside, that’s there to give these gases a way to escape (without letting oxygen in) after being packaged.

When Am I Good to Drink My New Coffee?

While it won’t hurt you to drink coffee that was roasted in the last twenty-four hours, you’re surely not getting the best that coffee has to offer. Since gases are still seeping out of the beans, it makes it difficult for water to penetrate the grounds and compromises the uniformity of the extraction. For this reason, I would not recommend brewing any coffee that is less than 3 or 4 days old. In fact, I would suggest drinking most coffees once they hit that week mark. Again, this is just a rule of thumb, but if you jump the gun, you’re not getting the most out of your coffee. On the other hand, if you let your coffee sit out too long, for months after being roasted and not properly stored, you’ll end up drinking a cup of stale misery.  

How Does Bruvi® Keep Our Coffee Fresh?

While it’s important that we let our coffees properly degas, it’s equally important to make sure we prevent them from becoming stale. At Bruvi®, as soon as the coffee has degassed, we freshly grind the beans and immediately package them into our B-Pods®. Each coffee pod is nitrogen flushed to push out any residual oxygen that will cause staleness. With this method, our gourmet coffee pods stay perfectly fresh for several months, giving you ample time to enjoy your coffee at its peak. We got this freshness thing down!