Interest in and the market for decaffeinated coffee is growing steadily. We explain where decaf comes from, who decaffeinates it, how its taste can be improved, and why it is undemocratic.
Until recently, I associated decaffeinated coffee with headaches. I drink coffee primarily for the pleasure of it, but I don't deny the effect caffeine has on me, which haunts me with headaches in its absence. This results in a somewhat complicated love-hate relationship between a cup of coffee, the caffeine, and me as a coffee drinker.
I wanted to investigate this situation and decided to drink only decaffeinated coffee for a month. I called it my Decaf December. In preparation, I adjusted my coffee consumption every day for a month before my caffeine-free month began:
Our Sueño - the decaf from Mexico from Rancho San Felipe
Every day, I replaced 5% of the weighed coffee beans for a filter coffee with our decaf beans. After nearly a month, I felt ready for Decaf December.
Or so I thought.
Welcome to another world
“Decaf” is not just another type of coffee drink; it is a universe of its own:
decaffeinated coffee often tastes different from untreated coffee. Decaffeinated coffee should be roasted and prepared differently, and the market behind the bean is completely concentrated on a few key players.
Interest in decaffeinated coffee has increased sharply in recent years. As a roastery, we feel this, as we roast more decaffeinated coffee every year. The reasons for the increased interest are individual, but we hear two specific ones most often:
- Giving up caffeine
- milder taste (milder here probably means less bitter)
I received many tips on where to find good decaf coffee after my call on social media. I was sent coffee samples and had great conversations.
>> If you know of any great decaffeinated coffees, please feel free to write them in the comments <<
I got real insider tips; it felt like coffee people on a treasure hunt. I asked myself, why does it have to be this way at all? Why does it seem to be not a matter of course to come across really delicious, decaffeinated coffee?
I spoke with some of the largest decaffeination companies in the world, who introduced me to the decaf cosmos. CR3, Swiss Water, Descamex. I spoke with Les Révélations from Paris, a roastery that exclusively roasts decafs, about how much the understanding of decaffeinated coffee seems to be changing, and in my self-reflection, I realized that we simply misunderstand decaf.
How is coffee decaffeinated?
Green coffee, i.e., the state of coffee before it is roasted, contains between 1–1.4% caffeine in Arabicas and between 1.8–3.5% in Canephoras (Wintgens, 2012). The roasting process has only a marginal influence on the caffeine; the content remains almost identical between green and roasted coffee.
The decaffeination process is applied to green coffee, i.e., before roasting. There are various processes that differ in their speed and efficiency and can influence the coffee's taste to varying degrees.
Common to all processes is that at the start of the treatment, the green coffee is placed in a closed vessel with water or steamed so that the pores of the green coffee open. A solvent is then added to extract the caffeine.
DCM / Dichloromethane for decaffeination
DCM, dichloromethane, is the most efficient at this, “but is not very selective,” says Sebastian Gabriel of CR3. Highly efficient means that a batch is decaffeinated in eight to nine hours. Not very “selective” means that not only caffeine but also other easily soluble substances are extracted, which are then lost to the coffee, and this often has an influence on the sensory profile.
Supercritical CO2 process for decaffeination
In the CO2 process, CO2 is used as a solvent. In the more efficient method, the CO2 works supercritically. In supercritical decaffeination, high pressure is used so that the coffee begins to undergo the first Maillard reactions; it slowly caramelizes, leading to initial color changes.
Subcritical CO2 process for decaffeination
In the subcritical CO2 method, the CO2 is brought into a liquid state under conditions of high pressure and low temperature, which, in combination with water, can absorb the caffeine. This process takes several days because, according to Sebastian Gabriel of CR3, CO2 is “a lazy solvent that takes about six to seven days to dissolve caffeine.”
Water process for decaffeination
The water process uses a “lye” that works without solvents, instead utilizing a so-called green coffee extract. To do this, green coffee A is soaked in water and then pressed through a semi-permeable membrane. The resulting water is saturated with the soluble substances from the green coffee, but the membrane filters out the caffeine. The green coffee B to be decaffeinated is then placed into this resulting “lye,” or green coffee extract, as Stacey Lynden of Swiss Water calls it. The extract now only targets the caffeine.
Ethyl acetate / Sugar Cane processing for decaffeination
In the ethyl acetate method, which is also somewhat prosaically called Sugar Cane processing, an ethyl acetate solvent is used to extract the caffeine from the green coffee. Ethyl acetate is formed during the esterification of acetic acid and ethanol. Because the solvent in the case of the decaffeination by Descafecol in Colombia is obtained from sugar cane, it is called Sugar Cane processing.
The taste of decaffeinated coffee
How should a decaffeinated coffee taste? Like a coffee that hasn't been decaffeinated? If we agree on that, then decafs have a really hard time because the decaffeination process is noticeable in most cases.
Whether that is negative depends on what we use as a taste reference for a decaf.
Is the reference for a decaf a non-decaffeinated coffee, or a decaf itself? Is the reference for a non-alcoholic beer that of a beer with alcohol?
In the case of Swiss Water, Stacey Lynden tells me that in the sensory analysis of decaffeinated coffees, they have an attribute for how strong the process notes are.
The coffee world has since managed to treat Robustas separately and discuss them in a different sensory category—even though it is also coffee. We also don't compare capsule coffee to an espresso from a portafilter machine because we know there are differences.
As long as we keep thinking that we should always penalize process notes in decaf, we remain stuck in a mindset and perhaps overlook what lies behind the taste and influences it.
It must be said that there are process notes and then there are “process notes”—the same green coffee processed with different decaffeination methods will taste different. Some heavier, some lighter—but what is even more important:
“Coffees with bigger personalities tend to stand out a lot more during the Decaf process”
says Stacey Lynden of Swiss Water Coffee, the largest decaffeinator using water. The more characteristic the green coffee being decaffeinated, the more characteristic the coffee tastes afterward.
Stacey Lynden from Swiss Water in Vancouver, Canada
“High quality coming in, high quality coming out”
The best decaf filter coffee in my Decaf December came from Les Révélations, a roastery from Paris. It was a Natural from Panama from Creativa Coffee District. I brewed it several times and shared it with the team, receiving feedback like, “ah, Natural, where does this come from?”—and I simply said, “Panama, roasted in Paris,” but omitted the decaf information.
We didn't taste the process notes because the green coffee was very characteristic: it was a Natural that had been fermented in closed containers before drying. As Stacey Lynden of Swiss Water would say: “high quality coming in, high quality coming out.”
Yes, the decaffeination process adds a process note to the coffee, but if the base material is characteristic, you can hardly taste it in individual cases.
What does the decaffeination process do to the coffee's taste?
The process also takes something away, namely bitter compounds, in addition to the caffeine, which is also already bitter.
“The acidity is also homogenized,”
says Sebastian Gabriel of CR3, the largest decaffeinator using subcritical CO2. Often, roasteries would buy lower-quality green coffee and then decaffeinate it because the process can slightly soften the poor quality. Or, more prosaically: "It can actually improve the poor quality of the green coffee in terms of taste, or flatter the green coffee," says Gabriel.
Sebastian Gabriel, CR3, Bremen
However, the decaffeination process always removes soluble compounds from the green coffee, for example, fats, carbohydrates, acids, or even melanoidins, which have an influence on our perception of texture—how a coffee feels on the tongue.
Swiss Water Decaf in Vancouver has designed its own evaluation sheet to document the changes before and after the process. They measure on a scale of 1 to 6 how much the coffee has changed. They judge flavor notes, acidity/sourness, and body—but they divide the latter into texture (mouthfeel) and thickness (density or fullness).
Stacey Lynden of Swiss Water says that the body of the coffee changes the most. This has to do with the loss of soluble compounds. Thus, in a decaffeinated coffee, there are relatively more insoluble compounds present than soluble ones. This not only influences the brewing but also the taste.
The color: darker, but not burnt
“The color change has primarily nothing to do with oxidation,”
Sebastian Gabriel of CR3 tells me. In their case—decaffeination with subcritical CO2—it is a combination of pressure, heat, rehydration, and re-drying of the green coffee that results in a color change.
Left: an untreated green coffee from Ethiopia; right: decaf from Mexico, decaffeinated with water
Stacey Lynden of Swiss Water says that the green coffee extract, i.e., the “lye” in the water process, leaves some of its color in the seed, making the coffee look darker.
Freshness: Decaf ages faster
However, both Gabriel and Lynden agree that oxidation generally occurs faster in decaffeinated coffee because antioxidants in the coffee are dissolved by the process. This means: the coffee ages faster—as green coffee and as roasted coffee.
An interesting fact about decaffeinated coffee is that it can exhibit a darker color even at a low final temperature in the roasting drum. As soon as it is ground, however, it remains light—the difference between the outer and inner color is relatively large.
For all non-decaffeinated coffees, this would be an indication of uneven development of the bean, but in the decaf case, it is the process that causes this phenomenon: during the process, the cell structure of the coffee bean becomes more porous and the coffee oils escape more easily.
This not only changes the color but also makes the coffee age faster. The opposite is also the case: due to the high porosity, oxygen penetrates the bean faster. That means: to get the maximum quality, you should buy decaffeinated coffee in small batches and drink it fresh to very fresh. While we wait up to three weeks for naturally processed coffees, we drink decafs already one week after roasting.
Preparing decaffeinated coffee
Even though decaffeinated coffee is still coffee, the process changes the brewing behavior. In all my tests during Decaf December, the water, DCM, and ethyl acetate decafs had longer extraction times in filter preparation than non-decaffeinated coffee. Subcritically decaffeinated CO2 coffees behaved most similarly to non-decaffeinated coffee, i.e., they had a similar extraction time in filter coffee.
“The decaffeinated coffee bean is more porous; it results in a larger contact surface for the water, so brewing takes longer,”
Sebastian Gabriel of CR3 tells me. They suspect that decaf breaks differently in the grinder, which we will examine soon in a grinding analysis.
The decaf beans (left) appear darker than the light-roasted filter coffee from Brazil on the right
In the ground state, the decaf (left) is barely darker
Stacey Lynden of Swiss Water therefore brews her decaf filter coffee with a coarser grind. However, since the decaffeinated coffee has already lost soluble compounds in the process, she measures a lower strength (or TDS) in her drink. Stacey advises:
- grind coarser
- dose higher
- shorter blooming time, because the coffee degasses faster
Back to our Natural coffee from Panama: the coffee was very good and roasted only recently; I extracted it slightly over-dosed. It showed hardly any sensory signs of being a decaf—why is this not standard?
Because of the quantity.
And the focus.
And the risk.
And the price.
In short: because the decaf market is highly consolidated and such coffees as our example from Panama are nano-stories in a less transparent mass market.
The decaf market: undemocratic and consolidated
Who actually decides which green coffee gets decaffeinated?
As a rule, it is trading houses that want to decaffeinate a certain green coffee, or already mixed coffees, so-called basket blends, from a decaffeinator (CR3, Coffein Company, Swiss Water, etc.). Sebastian Gabriel of CR3 told me that the decaffeinator is never the “owner of the goods, but only a processor.”
If it is not trading houses, then it is roasteries that want a certain coffee decaffeinated. We planned this with Rancho San Felipe a few years ago, for example: we gave the purchase commitment for 50% of a batch of decaffeinated coffee. They then had the coffee decaffeinated at Descamex, and since then, we have had the coffee in our range as Sueño.
Batch size is the bottleneck
For Descamex to decaffeinate the green coffee for Rancho San Felipe, they had to deliver 50 sacks of green coffee, i.e., 2500 kg. That is the minimum size to decaffeinate coffee at Descamex. At Swiss Water in Vancouver, it is now 4560 kg, and at CR3, it is around 3000 kg.
This leads to three challenges:
- First, a trading house or a roastery needs customers for approximately the 3000 kg minimum quantity of decaffeinated coffee. This volume should be sold relatively quickly, as the shelf life of decaf is shorter than that of non-treated coffee.
- The process is a blind flight—there is no possibility to just quickly decaffeinate a sample of a certain coffee and then decide whether it is sensorially interesting. The 3000 kg is the test batch.
- And again, sensory profile: if at least 3000 kg or more must be decaffeinated for it to be worth running the plant, which coffees are then processed? Exactly, rarely are they microlots, because there is only a little coffee of that type available.
Few complex decafs because the barrier to entry is too high
I joked with Piroska Hunyadi from Révélations that we actually need a 60 kg decaffeination machine so that it becomes attractive to decaffeinate very rare and sensorially complex coffees on a mini-scale.
The mentioned lot from Panama that she roasted was therefore at least 3000 kg, so Swiss Water could decaffeinate it. There are only very few coffee producers who can produce 3000 kg of coffee at such a level; in this respect, the barrier to entry for great coffees into the decaf market is much too high.
I would love to have a 300 kg lot from Peru decaffeinated because it is a coffee I would also like to drink in the evening. But it's not possible because there isn't enough coffee. Sebastian Gabriel of CR3 adds to this:
“Scaling is economically much more sensible. Decaffeination is capital-intensive, and the safety and environmental regulations are very high, which actually only justifies scaled production.”
Thus, the decaf market is not really democratic. As long as the batch sizes are so large—and even larger as at Swiss Water—smaller lots don't make it into the decaffeination process. Coffee drinkers lose out slightly in sensory terms: the very complex decafs will not exist, and if they do, only from a few farms that can produce super quality on a large scale.
A stark consolidation
We know that the coffee market is heavily consolidated: on the roasted coffee side, a handful of roasteries are responsible for 50% of the coffee offered. And on the green coffee side, the five largest countries produce more than 80% of all green coffee.
Now, the decaf market doesn't look any different:
The options for decaffeinators, where trading houses and roasteries can have their coffee processed, are severely limited. The ever-increasing price pressure and the associated efficiency efforts lead to batch sizes becoming ever larger instead of smaller. Special coffees, as mentioned, have difficulty being decaffeinated.
Final thoughts and a wish
“Decaf drinkers are the most loyal of all customers—if we manage to offer high-quality decaf, we are doing a service to our best customers,”
says Stacey Lynden of Swiss Water from Vancouver. Yes, from a sensory standpoint, she is right: decaf drinkers drink decaf because of the taste and the feeling, not because of the caffeine.
She sees great potential for even better decaf, as does Sebastian Gabriel of CR3. Common to all these statements is that they refer to the process, which should be as mild as possible so that the processed coffee is as close as possible to the non-decaffeinated coffee.
However, if we look at the coffee farm, it looks different. Very few farms or producers can produce lots of 3000 kg or more that are of the highest sensory quality—and if they do, there is still the decision of the trading house or roastery whether this coffee should now be decaffeinated.
These uncertainty factors, in my opinion, often lead to roasteries showing less courage when selecting decaffeinated coffee. But if roasteries team up and commit to a certain amount of coffee, then even the highest-quality coffees can be decaffeinated.
My wish, therefore, would be for a small decaffeination machine—one that could decaffeinate 60 to 120 kg. The market for this would be small roasteries that want to decaffeinate special coffees.
No headaches—and much more coffee
After the first week of my Decaf December, the headaches disappeared. I got up, drank a decaf filter coffee, and started my day feeling just as awake as usual. I drank filter coffee as if there were no tomorrow, because normally I stop drinking coffee by mid-afternoon so that the caffeine doesn't affect my sleep.
But in my Decaf December, I continued drinking coffee every evening, as there were no side effects. My bean consumption increased by 80%, naturally because I also tried different coffees. In the meantime, consumption has gone back down, but I continue to regularly drink decafs as filter coffee in the evening, but one thing has remained: I feel fewer to no headaches at all in the morning—perhaps it has to do with the 30-day abstinence from caffeine, perhaps not; in any case, a new world has opened up to me that I don't want to miss anymore.
Best decaffeinated coffee
Decaf recommendations: what are your tips? Write them in the comments.
A few highlights from my Decaf December were:
- JB Kaffee
- Revelations de Cafe
- 6054 Coffee Roasters
- Green coffee samples from Brazil via Touton from Alec Pfuhl
More about our decaffeinated coffee, the Sueño from Mexico:
- The story behind the coffee, the Rancho San Felipe
- The video for it, see below
- The coffee in the Shop CH and in the Shop DE/AUT
