Whole bean vs ground coffee: which should you buy?

Buy whole bean if you can. Whole beans stay fresh for a few weeks after roasting, while ground coffee loses much of its aroma within the hour, and grinding at home lets you match the grind to your brewer. Ground coffee wins on convenience, and on nothing else.

The cost is a grinder and a minute each morning. Here is what you get for it.

How fast ground coffee goes stale

Roasted coffee holds its aroma inside a hard, dry bean, along with a good deal of carbon dioxide. As the gas seeps out it carries aroma with it, and oxygen moves in and starts to turn the oils and flavor compounds stale.

A whole bean slows all of that down, because the gas and the air have to work their way through the bean. Grinding breaks the bean into a pile of tiny pieces and opens every one of them to the air. Peter Giuliano of the Specialty Coffee Association describes it this way: the carbon dioxide that whole bean coffee loses over weeks is lost in minutes after the coffee is ground. He puts whole bean freshness at about three weeks from roasting, and ground coffee at about an hour.

The National Coffee Association gives ground coffee one to two weeks at room temperature. That figure is about coffee still worth drinking. The SCA's hour is about coffee at its best, and it is the one we trust, because it matches what we taste.

You can check this at home without any equipment. Grind a spoonful of beans and leave it on a saucer for the afternoon. Then grind a fresh spoonful and smell the two side by side. The first sniff tells you most of what this article says.

Grinding for your own brewer

Ground coffee is usually sold at one medium grind meant for drip machines, and some bags are labeled for espresso. Every brewer wants something different:

• Espresso wants a fine grind, because the water passes through in under half a minute.
• A drip machine wants medium, and a single cup pour over a touch finer.
• A French press wants coarse, because the coffee sits in the water for four minutes and the grounds have to stay behind the mesh.
• Cold brew wants coarse too, since it steeps for hours.

Ground for the wrong brewer, coffee turns bitter or sour however careful the rest of your recipe is. With a grinder you can also fix a cup. If it tastes sour and thin, grind a little finer next time. If it tastes bitter and harsh, go a little coarser. Our grind size guide describes each setting by what it looks like.

What a grinder costs

There are two kinds. A blade grinder chops the beans with a spinning blade, and a burr grinder crushes them between two burrs set a fixed distance apart, which gives much more even grounds.

When America's Test Kitchen reviewed them, the blade grinders it tested were priced from about $20 to $70, and the electric burr grinders from about $146 to $400. Hand burr grinders are the cheapest way to get burrs, since you supply the motor.

A blade grinder is better than you might expect. For drip coffee, America's Test Kitchen's tasters found little to no difference between a good blade grinder and a burr grinder, even though the burr grinders produced far more evenly sized grounds. For espresso, where the grind has to be fine and adjustable in tiny steps, a blade grinder will not do. We compare the options in burr vs blade grinder.

It helps to put the price next to the coffee. A 12 oz bag makes about 14 pour overs. At $19 a bag, the cheapest burr grinder in that review costs about the same as eight bags, and the blade grinders between one and four.

When ground coffee makes sense

Ground coffee is a fair choice when you have no grinder yet, when you brew at an office or a campsite, or when the alternative is no coffee at all. If you buy it:

• Buy small bags you will finish within a week or two.
• Pick the grind that matches your brewer, if the roaster offers a choice.
• Fold the bag shut after every use and keep it somewhere cool and dark.
• Look for a roast date on the bag, and choose the most recent one on the shelf.

Why we only sell whole bean

Our FAQ says it straight: every bag is whole bean, so you will need a grinder. Coffee goes stale quickly once it is ground, and the difference is not subtle. If enough people ask for ground coffee we will look at it again.

A lot of work sits behind every bean. On our family's farms each cherry is picked by hand, only when it is fully red, and pickers walk the same trees up to six times a season. Grinding that coffee weeks before anyone brews it throws most of that work away. Aurelio, who planted the first trees at La Cumbre in 1961, wrote on the first page of his notebook: "A coffee tree remembers everything you do to it. So do the people who drink it."

Every bag is roasted to order by our roasting partner, Roastify, in Bend, Oregon, and ships as whole beans. Once it arrives, the rest is up to your grinder.