tongue. Medium roasts give the fullest body.
Storing Coffee Once roasted, whole coffee
beans keep reasonably well for a couple of
weeks at room temperature, or a couple of
months in the freezer, before becoming
noticeably stale. One reason that whole beans
keep as long as they do is that they’re filled
with carbon dioxide, which helps exclude
oxygen from the porous interior. Once the
beans have been ground, room-temperature
shelf life is only a few days.
Grinding Coffee The key to proper coffee
grinding is obtaining a fairly consistent
particle size that’s appropriate to the brewing
method. The smaller the particle size, the
greater the surface area of bean exposed to the
water, and the faster its contents are extracted.
Too great a range of particle sizes makes it
hard to control the extraction during brewing.
Small particles may be overextracted and
large ones underextracted, and the resulting