Coffee and Packaging and storage

Over the many years that I have dealt with coffee, I have found the it amazing how illogical coffee packaging can be.

Firstly let me excluded any type of instant packaging (including  instant coffee, pre-ground, pods, etc), these are designed for convenience and if you are a lover of coffee these should not be put in any category of coffee. I am talking about coffee beans only here.

So what types of packaging have I seen, and what are my comments:

• Tins, these are great if you are using the coffee in the next 7 days, otherwise they are a fashion accessory. Yes some fancy pancy products come with seals and they have some sort of Nobel gas in them, but even if the gas can survive for longer than 2 weeks, once the tin is opened the coffee gets flat quicker and 7 days is an absolute maximum
• Foil bag, this is another of these fashion things adding a non-return valve is also a great gimmick, convinces those who are impressed with blumph that they do something, best case they will keep the coffee fresh for about 10 days, but after that no thanks may as well put it in  a Tin.
• Vacuum pack, seriously now think about coffee gives off gas if it is fresh, so can this work NO, marketing crap
• Freezer Bag, this is probably the most effective, and if the coffee was not murdered when it was roasted then it will survive perfectly well in the freezer for between 2 to 3 months (depends on the roast level, and how often it is taken out of the freezer)

After the tests we performed, what where the conclusions:

• Fridge is worse than cupboard, especially if cupboard is dark
• Freezer only works if the oils are not exposed to the surface on roasting, otherwise the stuff should be thrown in the bin anyway
• Freezer bags work best in cupboards, and the freezer. Coffee straight from the freezer into grinder performed as well as stuff left to return to room temperature.

And the best thing is that if you are seriously interested in reading properly written articles than these claims are substantiated many times over.

Ethiopian Export news, commentary

With Ethiopia being of significance when it comes to specialty coffee, I do try and look for anything interesting about the country, and so I found: East Africa Forum » Coffee vs non-coffee commodities: "Ethiopia’s annual exports recently reached a never-before-seen level of USD 2 billion, a growth of 38 percent from the year before."

In this report there is good news exports are up 38%, and the largest importer of Ethiopian commodities is Switzerland, which is interesting, as that is also the capital of decaf coffee production.

So items of interest:

• Ethiopia now has five major non-coffee exports (oilseeds, gold, khat, flower, and pulses)
• Exports of goods in Ethiopia are only about 7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), compared to an average of near 30 percent of GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Coffee continues to dominate the top spot among Ethiopia’s exports but its relative significance is now at a historic low

South Africa drinks 20% less than the world average

So according the the website Current Worldwide Annual Coffee Consumption per capita, South Africa drinks 20% of the world average when it comes to coffee.

Are we serious that much into beer? I also read today that they claim that 60% of the coffee in South Africa is drunk in the workplace. Workplace coffee however is mostly instant at the moment.

There is a slow move towards a higher quality coffee, but the majority of coffee drinkers in South Africa think quality coffee is filter coffee. On that most filter coffee is purchased as pre-ground (yuk), which is the same as buying you coke open and two days old. If you vacuum pack two day old coke does it taste any different?

But I digress, lets go back to numbers. 66% of all coffee drunk in South Africa is instant, the other 36% is brewed coffee. Of that at least 90% of that is pre-ground, which means that 3.6% at most is in bean form. Excluding the specialty coffee market this means that only 710.4 metric tons of coffee are sold in their finest natural form, i.e. in beans.

What does this mean? Well that serious coffee drinkers in South Africa drink less than 1% of the world wide average.

Perhaps I have something funny in my cup, but these figures are strange. I may not drink 19,733 tons a year, but I get close to 10kgs a year, and that is above the Norwegian average :)