Coffee Is Great Prep Item

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Coffee, most of us can’t live without it, or think we can’t…

While considering food types to add to your survival food storage, don’t forget the coffee! If it came to the point of having to dig deep into your food storage, finding pounds of stored coffee will be a welcome sight. Most of us look forward to the morning aroma, taste, and caffeine kick to start our day. Just think how many people would be cranky without that morning cup or two. In fact, I can hardly think of a better barter item than coffee, if it came down to it.

So, what kind of coffee should I buy and how should I store the coffee to retain it’s flavor over time? Well, one thing that you should already be doing is rotating your survival food storage inventory, which will keep the food from getting too old (that’s why you should buy the foods that you normally would eat anyway). That in itself could be enough of a solution depending on the size of your inventory and how long it takes to go through rotation. We have bought a variety of coffees over time, some have been beans, some already ground, and in a variety of packaging. The best situation for longer term flavor retention is to buy sealed air-tight packaging, whereas some coffee’s are packaged in bags – some of which probably leak air over time. If you can smell the coffee on the packaging, it’s not air tight. Obviously, coffee in sealed cans are air-tight and probably your best bet for long term.

Lawrence, a MSB Reader suggests considering GREEN coffee beans, that is, coffee beans that are not yet roasted. I personally have not tried roasting my own beans yet, but I plan to give it a try. Some quick online checking indicates that it’s pretty easy to do and there looks to be a wide variety of roasting methods out there. Apparently freshly roasted coffee beans make for a very good cup of coffee (makes sense). Also, the shelf life of green coffee beans is apparently longer than roasted or ground since once the bean has been roasted-the volatile oils will begin to evaporate and tend to create a “stale” type of coffee-regardless of whether the packed beans are ground or not. As Lawrence also suggests, the green coffee beans can be purchased (check online for dealers) and then sealed in containers such as half-gallon Ball canning jars optionally with an oxygen absorber (500 cc) and then stored at room temp or cooler in a location absent of light.

Doing it yourself is a principle that more of us should strive for in general. The more things we are able to do for ourselves, the less we need to rely on ‘the system’. That is, the system in which we trade our precious time working for the employer, away from home and family, to simply exchange for paper money to buy the things for which we do not know how to create for ourselves. Of course we can never know and do everything, but there is a point where you can know and do enough to escape from ‘the system’.



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