Micro dose or light buzz? Decaf is the hottest thing in coffee right now

On a trip to Colombia last year, Weihong Zhang was given a “mysterious bag of coffee” by his friend Francesco Sanapo, a three-time Italian Barista Champion. This was not quite as suspect as it might sound: Weihong is the owner of BlendIn Coffee Club, a roastery with a pair of cafes in Houston. Mysterious bags of coffee are kind of his thing. With its notes of eucalyptus and strawberry, Weihong assumed the bag contained expensive beans like anaerobically fermented Geishas or Sidras. But Sanapo revealed something much more rare for a coffee of this quality. It was caffeine-free. “It completely opened my eyes to decaf,” Weihong recalls. He decided to use the beans, a basic typica variety from Finca Los Nogales in Colombia, in his upcoming appearance in Rancho Cucamonga at the US Brewers’ Cup, a competition that “highlights the craft of filter coffee brewing by hand.” He won. It was the first time in the competition’s 20-year history that a decaf coffee had taken the title. Such an unlikely victory isn’t quite the same as winning the Tour de France on a unicycle. But a comparison to the so-called Judgement of Paris in 1976, in which California wines prevailed in a blind tasting against established French vintages, isn’t so far off. The event upended perceptions of American wines and ushered in a new era of global wine production. As Sergei Kutrovski, who with his brother Mark runs Mirror Coffee Roasters in Bellingham, Washington, put it on their podcast analyzing the ramifications of this victory: “I feel bad for people who tattooed ’Death Before Decaf’ with, like, the grim reaper.” Changing perceptions Decaf has long been the subject of derision and jokes within the coffee industry and out. But it has quietly continued to grow in both quality and popularity. Skyquest Technology predicts that the decaf market will grow, from $US19.5 billion in 2022 to $US28.86b by the end of the decade. In 2022, Erin Reed, the director of marketing for Swiss Water Decaffeinated Coffee, told coffee industry publication New Ground that “decaf growth has largely been outpacing regular [coffee] growth over the past five years.” In an email, Reed confirmed that “this growth trend still holds. And is even stronger within the specialty segment,” referring to artisanal roasted, higher-quality coffee than typical grocery store fare. Sales of Blue Bottle Coffee’s Night Light Decaf blend put it in the “top five blends in both our cafes and online,” according to Matthew Longwell, the brand’s global director of coffee and beverage. With alcohol-free cocktails and meat-free hamburgers all the rage, decaf doesn’t seem such a strange proposition, says Adam Paronto, a founder of Chicago’s Reprise Coffee Roasters. “People want their drugs without their drugs,” he says. “I hear this phrase all the time, and it’s like: People want their rituals, but they don’t want it to mess them up where they can’t function normally, whether that be their job, or socially or whatever.” Renewed and Re-brewed New techniques in caffeine removal have played a key role. The process dates back to the early 20th century in Bremen, Germany, when Ludwig Roselius noticed that coffee beans accidentally soaked in seawater had lost most of their caffeine content while losing little flavour. In 1906, he patented a process that involved steaming coffee beans to open their pores. Then he switched to using benzene (now known to be a carcinogen) as a solvent to remove the caffeine and established Kaffee HAG (Kaffee-Handels-Aktiengesellschaft) to sell his decaffeinated coffee. Other solvents, such as methylene chloride-also a carcinogen-eventually replaced benzene and became integral to what became known as the European Method of decaffeination. Organisations such as the Clean Label Project recently petitioned the California Assembly and the US Food and Drug Administration to prohibit use of the substance, which has already been banned by the EPA in products like paint strippers. (The National Coffee Association has pushed back, arguing that all of the samples tested by the Clean Label Project were within the FDA’s level of concern.) A process for removing caffeine from coffee without the use of chemicals was developed in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in the 1930s. Swiss Water Decaffeinated Coffee has refined that method into a proprietary process in which green coffee is immersed in green coffee extract, during which 99.9 per cent of the caffeine is released and filtered out. (In the US, removal of 97 per cent of the caffeine is enough for a coffee to qualify as decaffeinated; in the European Union, 99.9 per cent must be removed.) While it is generally considered to preserve the taste of coffee better than other methods, the method is relatively expensive. It adds $US1 to $US2 per pound to the cost of the green coffee, says Paronto-not to mention travel and time to the process, because decaffeination takes place at Swiss Water’s facility in Delta, British Columbia. In recent years, another process using ethyl acetate has been gaining popularity. The chemical can be used in a synthetic form or derived naturally in what is often called the “sugarcane method.” In either case, the beans are steamed to open their pores and then soaked in a solution containing ethyl acetate, which bonds to caffeine molecules before being flushed. The coffee Weihong used was decaffeinated via a modified version in which the pulp, or mucilage, of the coffee berry is added to the fermented sugarcane solution. “It’s a groundbreaking way to do the decaffeination,” he says, because “it not only doesn’t take out any flavors, it imparts nuanced complexity into the cup.” On Friday, Weihong will try his hand in the World Coffee Championships at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Chicago. Whatever the outcome, things are changing quickly. He thought he had a six-month supply of Los Nogales decaf, but it sold out within a week of his victory at the US Brewers Cup. The next batch, a Castillo variety, is slated to arrive at the end of the month. Where to get a decaffeinated fix While Blue Bottle Coffee’s Swiss Water Process-treated Night Light Decaf is always available, the dawn of cold brew season has us looking to a more sporadic offering: Decaf New Orleans-style coffee and chicory. Traditionally served as a sweet, milky antidote to the Crescent City’s heat and humidity, this decaf version is suitable for even late afternoon coffee breaks. $US21 for 12oz Rather than just the typical decaf and half-caf, Chicago’s Reprise Roasters makes the cuts in its Uncaf line where you’d least expect them. Along with Zero, a 99.99 per cent caffeine-free Swiss Water Process-treated blend of beans from Central America and Africa, it offers the Micro Dose, with 10 per cent caffeine, and Light Buzz, with 25 per cent. $US16.49 for 12 oz Dare to challenge two stereotypes in one cup? Perc Coffee of Savannah, Georgia, offers decaffeinated Huila, a Colombian coffee that’s also instant. $US12 for a pack of five If neither caffeine nor brewing appeals, Explorer’s 32-oz, 20-serving bottles of cold brew concentrate offer a just-add-water solution. Daydreamer is a 99.9 per cent caffeine-free Swiss Water Process decaf brew; Seeker is the half-caffeine option. Do not, under any circumstance, confuse them with Maverick, which speeds in the opposite direction-meaning twice the caffeine. $US45 for a 32-oz bottle Bloomberg