Will an entrepreneur please make high quality (great tasting) decaf coffee ubiquitous?
There's a growing anti-drug sentiment that should be a great tailwind.
It's hard for me to find as good tasting a bean as it is with non-decaf. I've tried subscription services or pay huge shipping and product premium from some boutique retailer, the beans are always just ok. Decaf still doesn't get enough priority as the product itself, always an afterthought it feels like.
I'm not sure what your standards are, but I'm not sure if this is even possible.
I drink Stumptown which I grind at home for my espresso machine -- their caffeinated Hair Bender blend in the morning, and then in the afternoon I'll often have their decaf Trapper Creek (Swiss water process) on the days I don't need an extra jolt.
It tastes perfectly great to me. Maybe my palette isn't refined enough.
But decaffeination is always going to alter/remove flavor somewhat. So if you've tried high-quality versions like Stumptown and find them lacking, I'm not sure it's even chemically possible.
(Also I'm not super clear -- have you found high-quality decaf and you just wish it were more common? What brand(s) are high-quality? Or you haven't found it, and you're complaining that they're all "just ok"?)
The gold standard for this in sensory analysis is a triangle test — which I happen to have done with coffee from Ninth St Espresso, who sells a regular and substantial identical decaf. We brewed 3 identical batches (where 2 were the same beans and the 3rd was the other bean). In an office with ~12 tasters, the ability to pick out the “different” beans was 33%… ie random chance.
If the above sounds confusing, consider red wine vs white wine… visual inspection alone would get you 100% accuracy.
I used to believe decaf processing would have to change the taste, but empirically, with admittedly untrained tasters (but ones who know coffee very well), we couldn’t tell.
Decaf is simple to pick out by a person who is competent at tasting coffee. As easy as your red/white wine visual test. People in general are very bad at tasting and especially thinking and communicating about tasting. Plus also people may not know what decaf coffee tastes like or may have never thought about it before.
It will depend on your taste buds but I find that in bean form you can get reasonably good decaf coffees. Try a local roaster and one that was roasted 1-2 weeks ago or so. In instant it is very hard! This one is alright: https://www.republicaorganic.com.au/products/organic-decaf-i...
There's a growing anti-drug sentiment that should be a great tailwind.
It's hard for me to find as good tasting a bean as it is with non-decaf. I've tried subscription services or pay huge shipping and product premium from some boutique retailer, the beans are always just ok. Decaf still doesn't get enough priority as the product itself, always an afterthought it feels like.