Pu’er Coffee

 Today, vacuum packaging is a perfectly ordinary way to keep food fresh. But if we turn the clock back to the early 19th century, preserving coffee over long-distance transport was a serious challenge. Once coffee beans are roasted, they oxidize easily and lose their flavor quickly. If someone could solve that problem, it would be nothing short of a technological revolution. That’s exactly what we’re exploring today: who invented vacuum packaging for coffee, and how this invention went on to carry a coffee brand through more than a century of history. Before we get to the invention itself, we need to understand a coffee brand with over a hundred years of heritage—Hills Bros. Coffee, from the United States. As early as 1873, Old Austin Hills, a shipyard worker, traveled from New England to California with his two sons, Austin Herbert and Reuben Wilmarth. After settling down, the younger Austin and R.W. (as Reuben was usually called) began selling coffee, tea, and dairy products from...

 Thanks to the wild Double 11 discounts, many coffee lovers recently stocked up online, flooding our Taobao and Tmall customer service with coffee-related questions. Among the most frequent were: “How long can coffee last after it’s ground?” and “How soon should I finish it after grinding?” Interestingly, when people ask these questions, they’re not really asking about the shelf life of coffee powder. Everyone knows coffee beans or grounds can technically last up to 365 days . What they’re really asking about is the flavor window —the period when the coffee tastes its best. So, what exactly is a coffee’s “flavor window”? It refers to the optimal time during which a coffee’s flavor and aroma are at their peak. If brewed during this period, you’ll get the richest, most complete sensory experience. The reason coffee has such a window is because its flavor comes from volatile aromatic compounds —tiny molecules that begin to evaporate right after roasting. Once these aromas fade, th...