Colombia, Valle de Cauca, Washed, DECAF. 12oz. (Whole Bean)

Description

When we opened, we thought we’d straight up never do a decaf.

We thought “if you want decaf, you can go somewhere else.”

We had similar thoughts about sugar in drinks. At one point, milk.

We thought we should limit our range of flavors and ideas to what we liked best. That idea usually serves us well… we don’t buy a coffee we aren’t totally happy to drink, so when we sell a coffee we firmly believe “it’s good enough for me, I can stand behind this.”

Anyway, we were wrong. Way wrong. There are folks who can’t do caffeine and they like coffee. Lots of reasons. Most of them none of our business.

We learned from our silly mistake.

Decaffeination processes vary hugely. Most of what’s in favor in specialty coffee is very, very clean. Whether it’s Swiss Water, KVW, or EA process. Nobody uses the old school Roselius process from like 1903 anymore. We know Benzene is bad. 🙂

There’s a lot of appeal to Swiss Water decaf, in my opinion. When the green coffee is extremely fresh, it can be indistinguishable from caffeinated coffee. The issue we’ve had is that as it ages out (well before roasting) it can pick up brothy notes that we don’t enjoy. I’ve had cups that have tasted like coffee with cream of wheat and beef barley soup notes… and that is not what we’re after. I’ve also had Swiss Water Rwandan coffee taste like coffee, molasses, and spice… magic. But timing is everything. So we tend to buy Swiss Water when we happen upon one that is super fresh, and otherwise we vastly prefer EA decaf.

EA or Sugarcane decaf is a decaf process that is super common in Colombia, and uses ethyl alcohol from banana peel and sugar cane fermentation along with acetic acid (vinegar) to dissolve the caffeine (among other things) out of the coffee. What we like about EA coffee is that it tastes very classic-cup. Critique of EA Decafs is that they might detract from origin flavors, but in our experience, you only get detailed origin flavors for a very short time on Swiss Water decaf. KVW decaf tastes pretty much like EA Decaf to us.

Maybe this is getting too far off into the weeds. What it boils down to, is that EA Decaf tastes enough like coffee that I am sure I could serve it to you and you’d never know it was decaf. At home, we generally make half-caf with whatever else we have on hand, and go happily along with the rest of our day. My decaf drinker friends all swear by EA Decaf. We’re very happy with this coffee.