This Article is From Mar 10, 2010

Decaf coffee: New respect and new offerings

Decaf coffee: New respect and new offerings
New York: At coffee drinkers' high school, the decaf crowd always sits at the losers' table.

They know coffee geeks call their double-shot decaffeinated cappuccinos "why bothers." They lie awake deep into the night, pondering whether the waiter was spiteful or just lazy when he poured what was evidently a cup of regular.

But things are looking up for coffee's least respected fans. The latest wave of niche coffee roasters - the small companies that brag about their Bwayi beans from Burundi and their ceramic V60 coffee dripper from Japan - are committed to finding a more delicious decaf.

"We have a special obligation to the decaf drinker," said Peter Giuliano, director of coffee and an owner of Counter Culture Coffee, based in Durham, N.C. "Those guys are the true believers. They're not drinking coffee because they need to wake up. They're only drinking coffee because they like the taste."

Since the early 1900s, when commercial decaffeinated coffee was developed and sold under the brand names Kaffee HAG and Sanka, coffee without the buzz has been more of a chemistry experiment than a vehicle for flavor.

Later, as more companies got into the premium-coffee game, the best beans usually went into signature blends and single-origin offerings. Second-rate beans went to the decaffeination plant. "I think there was and still is an idea in the trade that it's just decaf, so use what you can get away with," said Doug Welsh, the vice president for coffee at Peet's Coffee & Tea and a pioneer in better-tasting decaffeinated coffee. "That's why the vast majority of decaf isn't very good. They didn't start out with the same coffee."

The decaffeination process itself doesn't help. There are only a few methods to remove the caffeine, but they all begin the same way: with soaking in water or steaming. That means raw beans arrive from the decaffeination plant in a kind of pre-brewed state, their flavor already compromised.

Now, the new breed of boutique roasters who focus extraordinary levels of attention on finding good beans are changing the art of decaf. As a result, decaffeinated coffee can have all the pedigree and, often, all the flavor any coffee geek could want.

First, they select raw coffee that retains its flavor, acidity and body even when it is roughed up in the decaffeination process. Then they roast with a gentle hand. And they try to make sure the beans move from farm to cup as quickly as possible, because coffee is an agricultural product and its quality declines with time.

"If you drink it strong, store it carefully and use it up quickly," Blue Bottle Coffee advises customers who buy its Decaf Noir beans, "you will be rewarded with very big flavors."

The roasters at Intelligentsia, based in Chicago, brag that their decaf La Tortuga from Honduras has a mouth feel "that remains sturdy through the captivating finish of dried figs and caramel."

Jeremy Tooker, the owner of Four Barrel, a small roaster in San Francisco, discovered clean, sweet and potent beans in the Nyeri region of Kenya. He thinks their bright citrus and deep fruit notes survive the harsh decaffeination process quite well.

"You'll never find a more articulate decaf," he said. Tooker has more than a passing interest in good decaf. Like many of his customers, he was advised by his doctor to limit caffeine.

The National Coffee Association puts the population of coffee drinkers who drink decaf every day at about 10 percent. But the niche roasters say that decaf consumption is higher among their customers.

An informal survey of roasters, restaurants and coffeehouses backs that up. At Counter Culture, about 18 percent of total sales come from decaffeinated coffee. At Jardiniere, a California-French restaurant in San Francisco, 33 percent of the coffee is decaf.

Baristas at a Starbucks near Grand Central Terminal said recently that about a quarter of the coffee they serve is decaffeinated. And at the Cocoa Bar in Brooklyn at about 9 p.m. on Valentine's Day, the people behind the counter said every cup in the place was filled with decaf.

The numbers reflect the appeal of a well-made cup of coffee without the buzz, which - especially in New York - is getting easier to come by.

At Maialino, the restaurateur Danny Meyer's new Roman trattoria in the Gramercy Park Hotel, an elaborate coffee bar is set up every morning. In addition to pulling espresso, baristas manage a long pour-over bar, where cone filters are set up over cups and streams of precisely heated water are poured over the grounds.

Managers selected Four Barrel as Maialino's house coffee after a double-blind tasting. The company's decaffeinated offerings, of which the restaurant orders about 30 pounds a week, were part of the attraction.

"One of the greatest compliments we'll get is from people who get a latte in the morning and it will be so good they'll have a decaf latte as a follow-up," said Sam Lipp, the assistant general manager.

And then there are people like Chuck Vanderberg, who works at an information technology job in Atlanta. He'd been a serious caffeine connoisseur since his days in Austin  in the mid-1990s.

"I was doing pour-over before pour-over was cool," he said.

But things change. He was approaching 40 and developing anxiety problems. His doctor suggested switching to coffee that didn't pack as much punch.

"My immediate gut reaction was the typical coffee snob reaction: 'I don't touch decaf. What's the point?"' he said. "And then I decided after the umpteenth day of getting angry in rush-hour traffic that I should probably check it out."

Over the course of two months, he slowly lowered the ratio of caffeinated to decaffeinated beans in his daily grind. "I have not really been able to discern a difference in the taste," he said. He gets his stash from Dean's Beans in Atlanta, which sells six different kinds of decaffeinated coffee, or from Porto Rico, because he grew up near the Manhattan coffee supplier.

Elite roasters don't agree on which method of removing caffeine is best, and some even use more than one, depending on the characteristics of the bean.

The "direct method" sends the steamed beans through a rinse of methylene chloride, which pulls out caffeine. The process leaves hundreds of other flavor compounds intact and only bare traces of the solvent, which drying and high roasting temperatures eliminate.

Welsh, who was traveling to coffee fields before many of the new wave of young roasters even had their first cup, prefers it.

"The solvents don't solve for the tasty things in coffee," he said. "You can get in and out fast without damaging the flavor."

Some newer roasters like Stumptown prefer the "mountain water process," saying it preserves the sweetness and balance in coffee. The name was coined at a plant in Veracruz, Mexico.

It's a new challenger to the Swiss Water Process, which the coffee roasters who came of age in the 1980s embraced. Swiss Water Process is actually a trade name used by a decaffeinating plant in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Whether it has the name Swiss or mountain attached to it, the industrial water process works through osmosis. A batch of green coffee beans is soaked in hot water and discarded. The brew is then sent through a carbon filter to remove the caffeine but leave the flavors and oils. A new batch of green beans gets soaked in the water, which draws out only the caffeine.

Removing caffeine - a bitter-tasting chemical that is in every part of the coffee plant and acts as a natural deterrent to pests - is also expensive. It can add a dollar or more to the wholesale cost of a pound, although decaf drinkers at the coffee bar pay the same for a cup as everybody else.

For all that, decaf still has a little caffeine. Amounts vary depending on how the bean is processed and how the roasted coffee is brewed. In 2007, Consumer Reports measured the caffeine in 36 small cups of decaffeinated coffee from restaurants and coffee shops in Yonkers, N.Y. Levels varied from 5 milligrams at McDonald's to 32 milligrams at Dunkin' Donuts.

That touch of caffeine is negligible to dedicated coffee lovers like Sterling Mace of San Francisco. She has been drinking decaf since January. She feels better, she said. No more of those afternoon dips in energy.

But the woman likes her coffee. So every morning she walks along the edge of the San Francisco Bay to the Blue Bottle Coffee Company in the Ferry Building, just as she did before she quit. She jokes with the people in line and shares the news of the day with the baristas.

"What was I going to replace that with?" she asked. "A trip to the gym? I don't think so."

Mace likes that the people behind the counter apply the same measured focus to her decaf Americano as they do to every other drink they make. There is no losers' table here.

But she's not kidding herself. She knows the rest of the coffee world can still be a cold, humiliating place for someone like her.

"I think it will change," she said, "but until then I'll drink my decaf in the shadows."

JUST HOW BOLD?

How good is the new breed of decaffeinated coffee? To find out, The New York Times held a blind tasting of seven decaffeinated coffees. Some were rare, single-origin beans, others were more familiar blends. For reference, there was a pot of Chock Full O' Nuts. All coffees were ground fresh and brewed in press pots for four minutes using water that had just come to a boil. Over all, the tasters were disappointed with the coffees, but did find some worth trying.

Recommended

1. Starbucks Sumatra: Great aroma and a smooth, chocolaty finish, if slightly over-roasted; $11.95 a pound.

2. Peet's Major Dickason's: An earthy, drinkable coffee from a medium roast. A touch barnyardy; $13.95 a pound. 3. (Tie) Four Barrel Ndiani-Kiagundo from Kenya A rich, lightly roasted brew with a sharp licorice edge; $12.50 for 12 ounces.

3. Blue Bottle Coffee Company Decaf Noir: A dark, almost astringent cup; $18.75 a pound.

Not recommended

4. Counter Culture Valle de Santuario from Peru: The unusual flavor and aroma reminded several tasters of Chinese takeout; $12.25 for 12 ounces.

5. (Tie) Stumptown House Decaf: Thin and one-dimensional, putting one taster in mind of bank coffee; $10.75 for 12 ounces.

5. Chock Full o' Nuts: Reminded tasters of grandmothers and affordable hotels; $5.19 for 12 ounces. 
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