Decaf is important to me. Why?
I’ve gone through periods where I haven’t been able to have caffeine at all. For most of my adult life I’ve dealt with migraines. Proper ones. Aura, half my body going numb, stuck in bed kind of migraines. My early symptoms feel remarkably similar to over-caffeination, which makes it hard to tell what’s actually happening.
Migraines genuinely scare me. The last one put me in hospital, and I’d prefer to not repeat that. These days, even one extra coffee can put me on edge. Am I over-caffeinated? Is this the start of a migraine? Sometimes just the thought is enough to make it feel real.
It’s made me really aware of how important the ritual of coffee is, even without the caffeine. For a lot of people, it’s not optional. And it shouldn’t feel like a compromise.
As a roaster, that’s a strange place to land. Coffee is my job, but it’s also something I’ve built my life around. Cutting back hasn’t been easy. On days where I have to cup a lot I know I can’t enjoy my usual ritual of a morning Lucky Stars flatty.
Even before all of this, I’ve always pushed back on the “death before decaf” thing. There’s nothing wrong with decaf. Some people need it, some people just prefer it. Either way, it deserves the same level of care.
Here’s some info on the process ours goes through:
We source our decaf through Caravela, using the same care we apply to all the coffee we buy. The process is called Ethyl Acetate Natural, sometimes referred to as the sugarcane process.
After the coffee is picked and milled the green beans are steamed to open the pores. Then they are rinsed for 10 hours in E.A. and steamed again to remove any E.A. residue. They are dried with hot air to reduce moisture content. Ninety-seven percent of the caffeine is removed in this process before they come to us and the remainder is removed when roasted.
Ethyl acetate might sound like a scary word but I swear it’s not! It’s naturally occurring, after decaffeination, residual EA is equal to or less than 30 ppm (a ripe banana, for example, contains around 200 ppm). EA has a boiling point of 70°C, and because coffee is roasted to around 220°C, there are no traces of EA left in the final beans.
<3 Kmac