I’m enough of a coffee geek that I weigh my coffee, time my pour-over and generally pay far more attention to making a cup of coffee than any sensible person probably should. My coffee scale with timer takes care of the weighing and timing, and an excessive number of other coffee gadgets take care of the rest. At some point, I also started worrying about what happens to the beans between cups.
Coffee beans don’t particularly like air, heat or light, which makes an opaque, airtight container a fairly logical place to keep them. I bought the KC Kitchen & Co. Airtight Coffee Canister for exactly that reason.
In fact, I bought two of them.
More than just a metal tin
At first glance, there isn’t much to it. It’s a robust metal canister with a lid. It feels solid and well made, and it’s straightforward to use and clean. The clever part, however, is the lid.
Rather than sitting permanently at the top of the canister, the lid can move down inside it as you use the coffee. A small handle on the side lets you release it, push it down towards the beans and then lock it back into position.
That means that as the amount of coffee decreases, you can also decrease the amount of air sitting above it. Instead of having 50 grams of beans rattling around at the bottom of a mostly empty 250-gram container, the lid follows them down. It’s a very simple idea, but it makes sense.
A surprisingly useful way to see how much coffee is left
There’s another benefit that I didn’t really think about when I bought it. Because the metal canister isn’t transparent, you would normally have no idea how much coffee was left without opening it. With this one, the position of the lid gives you a surprisingly useful visual indication.
If the lid is still near the top, I’ve got plenty of beans. Once it starts disappearing further down into the canister, I know I’m getting through them.
There is a small qualification, though. This only works if you actually use the lid properly, pressing it down towards the beans each time before locking it. You can leave it sitting at the top, but then you’re defeating the whole point of having an adjustable lid in the first place. Used as intended, it’s a handy little bonus that requires no extra effort.
Does it actually keep coffee fresh?
This is difficult to quantify without turning my kitchen into a laboratory, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve conducted a controlled scientific experiment on coffee oxidation.
What I can say is that my beans stay fresh. Opening the canister gives me that lovely fresh-coffee smell, much like opening a new bag, and I haven’t noticed the beans becoming obviously stale before I get through them.
The design also makes logical sense. The opaque metal body keeps light away from the coffee, while the adjustable lid lets me minimise the amount of air sitting above the beans as I work my way through them. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.
The packaging deserves a mention
The packaging contains some slightly unusual English, including the instruction: “Don’t put it into dishwasher.”
Fair enough. I won’t.
It also warns: “Please stay away from children as there is a risk of suffocation.”
There’s a dark joke in here somewhere about suffocating children, but let’s not go there.
As for looking after the actual canister, it’s straightforward to clean, and I’ve had no problems maintaining either of mine.
Is it excessive?
Probably.
At the end of the day, this is still a metal container for coffee beans. You can keep coffee in the bag it came in, and there are plenty of cheaper containers that will keep light away from the beans. I also think the KC Kitchen & Co. canister is slightly overpriced for what it fundamentally is.
And yet I really like it.
The adjustable lid isn’t some gimmick I’ve forgotten about after buying it. I use it every time I take beans out. It reduces the empty space above the coffee, gives me an immediate visual indication of how much I have left, and the whole thing feels robust and pleasantly simple to use.
My version is the 1,000 ml model, advertised as suitable for 250 grams of coffee beans. That works well for the amount I normally buy, but there are other sizes available if your needs are different.
I liked the first one enough to buy a second. Perhaps the slightly depressing part is that, out of all my coffee gear, I’m this excited about a metal container for keeping beans in.
But here we are.
Verdict
The KC Kitchen & Co. Airtight Coffee Canister is arguably an unnecessarily elaborate solution to storing coffee beans, and I do think it’s a little expensive for what it is.
But it’s also one of those products where the simple design actually works. It keeps the beans away from light, lets me reduce the amount of air inside as the canister empties, and the moving lid unexpectedly doubles as a useful way of seeing when I’m running low.
Would I buy it again? Yes. I already bought a second one. One for home, one for the office.
Would I recommend it? Absolutely. If you want a proper container for storing coffee beans, this is a very good one, and the different sizes make it easier to find something suitable for the amount of coffee you normally keep.
For a glorified metal tin, that’s about as strong a recommendation as I can give.