Green Coffee Storage

The Good, The Bad, and The Snugly

I don’t know who “they” are, exactly, but one of the things “they” don’t tell you when you first decide to start roasting coffee is how challenging it can be to store your green coffee when your business starts to grow.

In the beginning, it’s so simple. For years now, small roasters have had the option to buy less than 60 kilos of green coffee from places like Sweet Maria’s and Coffee Shrub. Maybe you even had your green coffee tucked away in plastic bins, stacked and labelled and safe. It was so cute. And even as you did start purchasing full sacks of 60 kilos or more, you never had more than a few bags on hand at a time.

But as you grow, storage can become a challenge. Things can get a little snug.

Although half of coffee roasters identify their primary business as wholesale, over 80% indicate they also operate retail and at least 20% are roasting coffee inside their coffeehouse. For a retailer roasting onsite, green coffee storage can be particularly challenging.

Best Practices

Before we touch on the logistical issues around growth and storage, we should review the best practices for storing any amount of green coffee waiting to be roasted. These guidelines will play a role in how you grow, though it should be noted, in recent years bag liners like GrainPro and Ecotact have brought significant changes to challenege of storgae and for some coffees some of the issues below are no longer a problem. Not everyone appreciates an acronym but if you don’t mind, here is a blast from the email past: HOTMAIL.

Humidity

Think of your green coffee beans as little sponges and around 11% (give or take) of their weight is moisture and that’s how we like it. We don’t want to give away any of this water weight before we roast the coffee. We also don’t want to add to this water weight. Too much moisture can lead to icky things like mold.

Odors

In the late 19th century, when Arbuckle Brothers coffee was dominant, it is said that rival salespeople would bribe warehouse workers to store onions next to Arbuckle’s coffee. Even though green coffee beans are not as porous as roasted coffee beans, they are sponge-like enough to absorb odors. Roasting space is almost always multi-functional for small roasters and green coffee can share that space with any number of smells that might find their way into your coffee. If you can smell it, so can your coffee.

Temperature

Aim for room temperature, in the neighborhood of 70 degrees. Heat leads to moisture and air that is too cold is dry and in extreme cold green coffee can freeze.

Moisture

Heat and humidity result indirectly in moisture added to green coffee. You should also avoid allowing the coffee to get wet more directly. I’ve seen green coffee stored too close to an open door and get wet during a heavy rainstorm. If you have to unload coffee while it’s raining, cover it up. Also, from leaks in the roof to broken pipes, floors end up wet for any number of reasons, so keep your green coffee off the ground.

Air

Well, not much you can do about oxygen. It happens. It helps that most green coffee these days comes inside plastic liners like GrainPro or Ecotact. Green coffee that does not come inside plastic should be ordered more frequently so the coffee spends less time on the shelf.

Insects

Insects and other pests are not generally a problem once coffee is safe and sound at the roastery but let’s not make it easy for them. Keep bags closed and off the ground.

Light

Expose your green coffee to as little light as practical and out of direct sunlight if possible.

Most of these “HOTMAIL” issues are not super relevant to roasters who are moving small amounts of coffee through their roastery at a fairly quick pace. They require more thought as the volume of coffee you have on hand increases and the logistics as well as the quality of storage become more important … or annoying.

Growing Pains

Cash-flow aside, planning your green coffee purchases when you only have a few bags on hand at any time is relatively simple. You know how much of any given coffee you roast in a week on average (right?). When the weight dwindles to a two- or three-week supply, it’s time to order more. New coffee arrives and the bag that is almost empty sits on top of the new bag, easy-peasy, storage is not really an issue.

Your coffee is great, you’re meeting a need in your market, turns out you’re pretty good at sales since you care about the coffee and you have a point of view, that is, something you want to say or accomplish as a coffee roaster. So, your business grows.

Chances are you will outgrow your capacity to store green coffee before you outgrow the capacity of your coffee roaster. I mention this because the need to move into a larger space should be driven by the need to increase your roasting, packing, and shipping capacity, not green coffee storage.

Packing and shipping capacity includes the “flow” inside your roasting space. Ideally, green coffee flows smoothly in and roasted coffee flows smoothly out. If you’re tripping over bags of green coffee as you try and ship out roasted coffee, or continuously moving bags of green coffee around on a roast-day to reconfigure the space for the next process, you need to think about storage. It doesn’t mean you need to lease a larger roasting space.

These are growing pains that you might need to just live with for a time but before you consider committing to a larger space, consider off-site storage, a $2000 a year commitment rather than a $2000 a month commitment is worth the inconvenience. If you have the room outside, you can rent a storage container but you’ might be trading convenience for temperature control. This might be a good trade if you’re churning the coffee fairly fast.

If you’ve reached the point where you’re taking delivery of 10 or more bags a month from Covoya, we’re happy to talk with you about maintaining a position, that is, contracting coffee but leaving it in the warehouse until you’re ready to take delivery. Just rmember, coffee on contract belongs to you, you own it, even if you have not released it and paid for it yet. We can't sell it to anyone else because it's your coffee and because it's your coffee, don't forget, you will be charged for storage, just like we pay for storgae on coffee we own, which is not your coffee.

Finally—and believe it or not this does not go without saying—don’t buy too much coffee. Buy what you need when you need it, not what you can because you can. Don’t buy green coffee based on your aspirations, especially if you're buying into your position for future use. Buy green coffee based on your history and the mostl likely trnd going forward.