Best Decaf Coffee Beans

March 15, 2018|Russell Volz|Beans And Roasting

Have you ever wondered what makes the best decaf coffee beans? Maybe the easy answer is to ask, what makes the worst decaf coffee beans? We can answer that question in a single word; chemicals. That’s right. For decades decaf coffee has been made by using chemicals similar to formaldehyde to decaffeinate coffee beans.

Formaldehyde Decaf Coffee?

You’d expect large industrial coffee companies like Yuban, Hills Brothers, Folgers, Starbucks, and Costco to use industrial chemical processes, but you wouldn’t expect specialty coffee companies to use chemicals, but many do. Recently, I learned that over 90% of all decaf coffee is processed using chemicals. In a large part, it’s these chemicals that leave the coffee beans tasting nasty. And that doesn’t even take into account what those chemicals are doing to your body.

Swiss Water Processed

I don’t know about you, but I don’t chemicals in my coffee. You might then ask, when making the best decaf coffee beans, what’s the alternative to chemicals? As a master roaster, we at Lake City Coffee, make the best decaf coffee beans by using water, auga, H2O. That’s right, running coffee beans through seven baths of 100% pure water will extract the oils in the beans. These oils are where all the bioflavonoids, antioxidants, flavor, and yes caffeine reside. With the coffee bean oils in hand, filtering the caffeine out is a simple process of using a reverse osmosis filter. This is known as the Swiss Water process and the best decaf coffee beans in the world use this process exclusively.

Best Decaf Coffee Beans

I’ve learned that not all coffee beans are created equal. Likewise, for the best decaf coffee you need to start with good quality, high altitude grown, hand picked, sun dried beans. Now here’s an important point. It’s odd to learn that some beans can be roasted dark and some can’t. As it turns out, decaf beans are one of those beans that need to take on a medium light roast. Unfortunately, most industrial coffee roasters burn the snot out of their decaf coffee beans. No wonder most decaf coffee tastes nasty.

The final result of the best decaf coffee beans is a super smooth, naturally sweet taste. As you might guess, it’s difficult to tell the difference between the best decaf coffee beans and our regular coffee. In fact, we get more comments on our decaf coffee than all our other coffee roasts put together. It’s that good.