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]