Decaf Coffee: What is it, really?

There has long been a lot of debate over decaffeinated coffee (decaf) in the coffee industry, and I mean A LOT. Is decaf coffee bad for you? Is it totally safe? Is it even caffeine free? The answer to the last question is no, no it is not. A lot of research has been done on the topic, and I’m here to break it down for you. Let’s start with the basics. What is decaf coffee? How do we get coffee beans to the point where they have “no” caffeine? There are three ways which one can decaffeinate a coffee bean. All of them occur prior to roasting when the bean is still green. This is because at this point nothing about the bean has been altered so it is easiest to get at the coffee’s individual cells.

Before we start, if you are someone who opts for drinking decaf, you shouldn’t be ashamed of it. There seems to be a certain stigma around decaf because it isn’t strong or necessarily flavorful. But contrary to popular belief, there are many brilliant decaf coffees out there. Drinking it is totally okay. Caffeine is a psychoactive substance that can trigger anxiety or raise anxiety levels in already anxious people. It can lead to problems like insomnia or heart palpitations, and there are many people out there that are rightfully worried about things like this, so they choose decaf.

Caffeine extraction through the use of methylene chloride and ethyl acetate is the most common method to decaffeinate a bean. These are two chemical solvents, so we are using chemistry to alter the coffee. In this process the coffee beans are steamed by these solvents until the caffeine is in essence washed away from the bean. In this method, you’re not only evaporating the caffeine, but many of the flavor profiles. To counter this, many places will then soak the beans in a coffee cherry flavored solution so the beans reabsorb some of that flavor back.

A popular method using carbon dioxide (CO2) can also be used to decaffeinate beans. This process begins by allowing the beans to soak in regular water, which causes them to expand and open up a little. Subsequently, the beans are taken out of the water bath and placed in an area where the temperature is turned way up and carbon dioxide is forced on to the beans at a high pressure for several hours, allowing it to flow into every corridor of the bean’s cellular make up. The CO2 takes the caffeine from the beans and evaporates with it. This method leaves the most flavor intact because CO2 doesn’t break down any of the fats stored in coffee beans. This method is also the most time and energy consuming, however.

But don’t worry, using chemicals or gases isn’t the only way you can decaffeinate coffee beans. A famous method invented in Switzerland and popularized in Canada uses simply water and carbon to filter out the caffeine. A hot water bath soaks the coffee, moving all the caffeine and flavor from the beans into the water and creating a sort of coffee bean flavor extract. The extract is then forced through a carbon filter, weeding out any caffeine and then it is used to soak the next batch, which hopefully adds some flavor in the process of removing caffeine. While this process does not involve the use of chemicals, it produces often bland tasting decaf.

So now that you know how coffee beans are decaffeinated, you may be wondering what all the debate about decaf is. You may have heard that it’s bad for you, or that you’re being exposed to many chemicals, or something similar. While this is partly true, it is also blown out of proportion a lot of the time. The reason we hear these types of things could be due to old information still circulating. In the early 1990s a method of caffeine extraction using benzene which contains carcinogens was used, but that is no longer a method practiced. Another reason might be the first method, methylene chloride and ethyl acetate extraction, listed above. This is the quickest, easiest, and most cost-effective method which makes it the most popular one out there and many of the decafs you will encounter are done by implementing this method. While you are indeed using chemicals to get the process done, the amount of these chemicals remaining on the bean once it’s done being processed and then after roasting is negligible and considered very food safe. But, in the end it is still chemically altered in a way, rather than being a completely natural method. Specifically trying to find decaf that isn’t processed in this way is a very difficult task. It’s not really specified anywhere, and most coffee shops simply won’t know how their decaf was done.

If you have a way to determine how your decaf was made, and can choose the water bath or CO2 method, that’s great! Luckily, it appears that we are trending away from the methylene chloride and ethyl acetate methods in recent years, with specialty roasters beginning to source decaf processed via the Swiss water bath method. Those still remain the most popular, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in ten years we’re sitting here only talking about water processed decaf.

Decaf isn’t as straight forward and one dimensional as everyone assumes. You can still find many varieties of decaf, and you can certainly pick apart flavor profiles of different decafs, although this is made slightly more difficult by the transformations the coffee goes through when it is being decaffeinated. The industry is moving in a direction that will feature more and more water bathed decaf. Maybe a decaf revolution is on the cards?