This is one of my least favorite things to do. Reading a bit on the Wendelblog about re-bagging Kenyan coffee's, it reminded me how much I hate doing it.
We had a lot of Brasil coffee that were worrisome. We transferred them out of jute (as we do any coffee not sealed at origin) and had them in liner bags until we vacuum packed them a bit later when the equipment arrived. It was not fun packing. You really had to be careful how you bagged them and how you stacked them because if the seal broke, the entire purpose of repacking was lost. It took us a while to get a method down so that you could stack the 'bricks' and not worry about the pressure breaking the seal. We used nice bags and though I don't have photos to share, it is impressive to see the pallets of silver bags.
What made the Brasil so worrisome and really bothered me was every time I opened a bag to profile on the Mini, the coffee would change and fade relatively quick. We are talking about two to three weeks of time in my kitchen closet and the coffee just died. Rather strangely, this remarkably clean tasting screen dried natural became a fermenty wild 'strawberry' natural with the bready Brasil character I hate so much. A few times it even became peasy and/or dirty peanut. I doubt I will buy more Brasil in the future if I can get a good Rwanda source but that's another discussion entirely.
The weird thing was going back after six months, the vacuum packed bags are still fine though lacking that fresh character but I have a lot of half opened bags that just went nasty quick. Makes you really wonder what's going on when people say coffee can last so long or be stored in such poor conditions without them noticing an issue.
Jute is out, nitrogen flushing and vac packing is the new progressive standard.
