I’ve been getting my coffee from Old City Coffee for years, decades in fact.

I used to go to their store at the Reading Terminal Market, where I’d typically get two pounds of whole bean coffee at a time. One pound of regular and one pound of decaf. As I like a full-bodied brew I’d typically get some combination of Mocha Java, Columbia, and their own San Francisco blend.

They offered a discount card where after you bought ten pounds of coffee, you’d get a free pound, so I always presented my discount card so they could notate it, and when it got full, I’d get my free pound of coffee and get a new card.

But then Covid hit and shortly thereafter I moved to this house which is just a little bit farther away. And it became just a little less convenient to get to the Reading Terminal Market quite as often.

So I explored their online store and discovered that if I bought five pounds of coffee at one time, the sixth pound was free. Hmm. Without consulting my calculator, that sounded like a better deal to me.

But would the coffee stay fresh if I bought that much of it at a time?

Only one way to find out.

Turns out, that yes, keeping it the Old City packaging and storing it in a cool, dark place (a cupboard just beneath the AC) was just the ticket. The coffee remained fresh for the three months or so that it took me to consume it.

The added bonus is that buying it in bulk like that, the shipping is free, they ship the same day I place my order (I always order in the morning), and I receive it the next day.

How this might work for folks who aren’t quite as close as I am, I don’t know.

Meanwhile, I have a couple discount coffee cards that I never completed.