There used to be this misperception that if a coffee was decaffeinated, it didn’t matter what beans were used, because they weren’t “real” coffee drinkers. I take a completely different viewpoint. If someone is willing to drink a coffee and forego the pleasure of its caffeine – gasp! – they must really love coffee for its taste. So it behooves me to source something truly special to satisfy them!
I haven’t carried a decaf until now as I find the demand low here. Maybe because the options aren’t great?
In any event, I’m pretty thrilled now to offer this tasty blend of organic washed Arabicas from Papua New Guinea, Honduras and Peru. They were decaffeinated in an organic certified facility in Bremen using the C02 supercritical carbon method (don’t ask).
As per the National Coffee Association USA, decaffeination removes 97% or more of a coffee’s caffeine so a typical cup of deca will contain around 2 mg of caffeine as against a typical regular cup at 95 mg. Just to prove the point, I drank a filter cup of it myself tonight and was delighted to find it had pleasant malty aromas, some orange acidity and a very rounded body. Decaffeination processing has come a long way…they didn’t used to taste this good and to be honest, I would hardly have been able to tell it’s a deca. So here’s for all you coffee lovers out there who want to cut back on the caffeine, cheers.
A few facts for the record:
Coffee is decaffeinated in its “green” or raw form, then roasted. And Swiss Water Decaf is a company in Canada, it doesn’t mean the coffee was processed here in Switzerland.