One of the sad­dest parts about grow­ing older is dis­cov­er­ing that caf­feine and I are not good friends. This is heart­break­ing, because I love cof­fee and would hap­pily drink it all day long if I could. But I can­’t. And I don’t mean I have to ask Monterey to cut me off at four cups of their bot­tom­less pours on the week­end, or that I can only have it before lunch­time. I mean I am now at the stage where one cup affects my sleep so badly that I can now only drink it on Fri­days, when it does­n’t mat­ter if I get to sleep late because I can get up late on Sat­urday. This SUCKS.

Sure, I could have tea, or some­thing else, or go without com­pletely, and for the most part I do. But this is Wel­ling­ton, and I love my lattes. So I’ve star­ted drink­ing decaf. In fact, I have been doing a lot of research into where I can get drink­able decaf, and here are my res­ults. In the interests of SCIENCE, I should point out that cof­fee places are chosen based on their prox­im­ity to where I was at the time that I wanted a cof­fee, as opposed to being spe­cific­ally sought out.

  • Mucho Mucho, Man­ners Street: the cof­fee is spooned out of a can­nis­ter, and tastes stale. Also the milk is overly hot – which is a fea­ture across their chai lattes and reg­u­lar lattes too. Alas. 
  • Charlie Bill, Tinakori Road: Charlie Bill does the most amaz­ing brunches ever. How­ever, their decaf lattes are pretty dire. to be fair though, they use Caffe Laf­fare beans which are my least favour­ite any­way. Drink cham­pagne instead with your deli­cious orange & cin­na­mon french toast.
  • Trade Kit­chen, Jer­vi­os Quay: Actu­ally, this was Caffe Laf­fare too, and made excep­tion­ally well. Still a bit of an after­taste though.
  • Fuel, War­ing Taylor Street: made okay, decent tem­per­at­ure, but just tastes a little flat. Fuel hot chocol­ates, how­ever, taste like chocol­ate mousse, so I’d recom­mend them instead.
  • For the pur­poses of SCIENCE, I even tried a (free!) decaf Nespresso  at the Food Show. It was a long black, so no chance for them to mess up the milk, and I was rollingly drunk pleas­antly tipsy by that time, but it tasted pretty much the same as what I ima­gine their reg­u­lar long blacks would taste like. ’
  • Mojo Air­port: Mojo charges an extra 90 cents for decaf. This means a large decaf latte will cost you $6.10. Yeah, not really very happy about that eh, espe­cially when it took 20 minutes.
  • Lama­son: Now THIS is the busi­ness. Beans freshly ground, beau­ti­fully made, full of fla­vour with no chem­ic­al after­taste, served with a smile. These cof­fees are so good and so drink­able they are dread­ful for the bank bal­ance. Just avoid the 10am rush.

With Lama­son being a clear win­ner, I con­tac­ted their bean sup­pli­er, Peoples Cof­fee, to find out just why their decaf was so good, and their lovely roast­er René Macaulay answered my ques­tions.

I wanna know, what the heck is decaf any­way? How is it made? 

Decaf is nor­mal cof­fee which has been put through a ‘water pro­cess’ to remove caf­feine as it is water sol­uble, this is done in green bean form before roast­ing, and involves spe­cial fil­ters to remove the caf­feine. Ours is pro­cessed in Mex­ico.

Inter­est­ingly many fla­vours in the beans are also water sol­uble and must be added back to the cof­fee once the caf­feine has been removed from the water. This pro­cess of water soak­ing smooths out some of the fla­vour and changes the bean struc­ture a lot for roast­ing, mak­ing it a chal­len­ging roast to get tast­ing nice.

How­ever our decaf is treated with much care, as I am very aware many people want cof­fee without caf­feine, and every cafe buys it!

As with all our roasts we are very care­ful to repeat the optim­um roast every time for each bean, and decaf is suf­fers no snob­bery here, I also have qual­ity con­trols on site here which elim­in­ate undesir­able beans which can be cre­ated dur­ing the decaf­fein­a­tion pro­cess (which means each cup will be the same good­ness) I have worked hard to get our decaf tast­ing like “nor­mal cof­fee’ people often don’t believe it’s decaf dur­ing a blind taste!

Why is it Lama­son is the only place I’ve tried so far that makes it taste like real cof­fee?

The last link in the chain is the brew­ing, apart from being a brew­ing geni­us team, Lama­son has a decaf grinder which is cru­cial for espresso, 1 minute old ground cof­fee is dead for espresso. Some cafe’s are using pre-ground decaf which might be a week old can nev­er pro­duce a nice cup, how­ever decaf grinders are often only in busy cafes who can war­rant $800 for a sep­ar­ate grinder just for decaf. 

As for volume, many cafes would be doing under 50 cups a week of decaf as apposed to 100’s of cups a day of nor­mal cof­fees.

Am I able to do any fancy cof­fee drink­ing (syphons etc) with decaf?

Usu­ally decaf isn’t the most premi­um beans as the pro­cess changes the fla­vours, and it is destined for espresso in cafes. Fancy expens­ive cof­fees don’t usu­ally get pro­cessed into decaf as it’s so expens­ive to do, it must be done in bulk (18 ton) and you might lose the nice fla­vours dur­ing the pro­cess.

I per­son­ally wish cof­fee had less caf­feine so I could drink more of it, I enjoy a decaf flat white from time to time, espe­cially at night.

So there you go. Any­where else doing decaf worth drink­ing? Let me know!

[Photo by Jak­ub Dzi­ubak on Unsplash]