Up live today via Serious Eats, another in what’s become a pretty darn impressive body of work on that site from contributor Liz Clayton. Today’s feature taste-tests and provides infotainment on a variety of decaffeinated coffee offerings, but we’ve been equally enamored with Liz’s recent stroll through the coffee aisle at Trader Joe’s, her coffee tour of Montreal, and this treatise on the improving status of fancy restaurant coffee
On the modern delights of decaf:
Natural processes of decaffeination available nowadays, such as Swiss Water, which eschews chemicals in favor of a pretty amazing soaking-green-coffee-in-decaffeinated-green-coffee-extract method, allow for green coffee beans to release caffeine molecules while retaining as much integrity to the flavor compounds of the bean as possible. Decafs these days are capable of coming out of the gate with great nuance of flavor, minus that tiny bit of edge.
Clayton goes on to profile Four Barrel’s Buena Vista Bolivia, Coava’s Capucas Honduras, Batdorf & Bronson’s Decaf Dancing Goats blend, Intelligentsia’s House Decaf, and Grumpy’s La Igualdad Guatemala. Read the full feature on decaf here, and learn more about the Swiss Water Process here!
