Decaf Explained
Summary
TLDRThis video delves into the world of decaffeinated coffee, addressing the common misconceptions and highlighting the potential for high-quality decaf. The host explores the history of decaf, from its controversial beginnings with benzene to modern methods like the Swiss Water Process and supercritical CO2. They discuss the importance of freshness and the impact of decaffeination on coffee's roast and flavor, emphasizing the need for specialty roasters who prioritize decaf quality. The video concludes with tips for enjoying decaf at home, advocating for its taste and health benefits when done right.
Takeaways
- ☕️ Decaf coffee is often considered inferior due to its disappointing taste in many places, but it can be as enjoyable as caffeinated coffee when prepared correctly.
- 🍃 The decaffeination process can affect the coffee's taste and quality, with methods like the Swiss Water Process and supercritical carbon dioxide being popular for their gentler approach.
- 🚫 The original decaffeination method using benzene was abandoned due to its carcinogenic properties, leading to safer alternatives like ethyl acetate and methylene chloride.
- 🌱 The choice of decaffeination process can impact the coffee's flavor profile, with some methods being perceived as less intrusive to the coffee's natural taste.
- 🏥 Health considerations play a role in the preference for decaf, with some consumers avoiding caffeine for reasons such as sleep quality or anxiety.
- 🔍 The level of caffeine reduction in decaf is significant, typically reaching below 0.3% caffeine by weight, which is more than 99.7% caffeine-free.
- 📊 The analysis of decaf coffee shows higher chlorogenic acid levels, which are beneficial polyphenols for gut health.
- 📉 Decaf coffee tends to stale faster than caffeinated coffee due to its increased porosity, emphasizing the importance of freshness.
- ❄️ Freezing decaf beans can help maintain freshness, as decaf is more susceptible to oxidation and degradation over time.
- 🛒 Sourcing decaf from roasters who prioritize quality and freshness is crucial for a good decaf experience, as not all cafes or roasters may handle decaf with the same care as caffeinated beans.
Q & A
What is the main controversy surrounding decaffeinated coffee?
-The main controversy is that many coffee enthusiasts believe decaf coffee often disappoints in taste compared to its caffeinated counterparts, leading to a skepticism about its quality.
Why are some people against decaffeinated coffee?
-Some people are against decaffeinated coffee because they believe it lacks the rich flavor of regular coffee and is often of lower quality.
What is the significance of the year 1905 in the history of decaffeinated coffee?
-In 1905, Ludwig Roselius, a German coffee trader, patented a process for decaffeinating coffee using hot water and benzene, marking the beginning of commercial decaffeination.
What are the three main decaffeination processes discussed in the script?
-The three main decaffeination processes are the use of organic solvents like methylene chloride or ethyl acetate, the Swiss Water Process, and supercritical carbon dioxide extraction.
Why did the use of benzene as a solvent in decaffeination become controversial?
-The use of benzene became controversial because it was later discovered to be a carcinogen, leading to its discontinuation in the decaffeination process.
How does the Swiss Water Process for decaffeination work?
-The Swiss Water Process involves steeping green coffee in hot water to extract caffeine and flavors, then using activated carbon to remove caffeine from the liquid, which is then reused to decaffeinate new batches of green coffee.
What is the significance of the 'supercritical carbon dioxide' process in decaffeination?
-The supercritical carbon dioxide process uses the properties of CO2 under specific temperatures and pressures to extract caffeine from coffee beans without the need for additional solvents.
Why does decaffeinated coffee often taste disappointing?
-Decaf coffee often tastes disappointing because the decaffeination process can disrupt the coffee bean's structure, making it more porous and altering the roasting and brewing characteristics, which can lead to a less desirable flavor profile.
What is the role of chlorogenic acids in decaffeinated coffee?
-Chlorogenic acids, which are polyphenols, are present in higher quantities in decaf coffee compared to caffeinated coffee. They are beneficial for gut health and contribute to the overall health benefits of coffee.
Why should decaffeinated coffee be stored differently from caffeinated coffee?
-Decaf coffee should be stored in a freezer to maintain freshness because its porous nature makes it more susceptible to staling due to oxygen exposure.
What is the advice for finding and brewing great decaffeinated coffee at home?
-To find great decaf, look for roasters who take pride in their decaf offerings. For brewing, ensure the coffee is fresh, possibly by freezing, and adjust your brewing method to account for the decaf's unique characteristics.
Outlines
😕 Controversy and Quality Concerns of Decaf Coffee
The speaker begins by addressing the controversy surrounding decaffeinated coffee, highlighting the skepticism of some coffee enthusiasts who prefer regular coffee. They argue that while decaf is often disappointing, it can be just as enjoyable as caffeinated coffee when prepared well. The speaker aims to explore the reasons behind the varying quality of decaf and to discuss the history, health aspects, and how to make a great cup of decaf at home. The historical origin of decaf is traced back to 1905 in Germany, where a coffee trader named Ludwig Roselius developed an early decaffeination process using benzene, a carcinogenic compound, which is no longer in use today.
🔬 The Evolution of Decaf Processes
The paragraph delves into the evolution of decaffeination processes, starting with the replacement of benzene by methylene chloride, also known as dichloromethane. This compound, despite being effective, is not ideal for consumption and is now less popular due to negative public perception. The successor, ethyl acetate, derived from sugarcane, is presented as a natural and less controversial alternative. The speaker also discusses the Swiss Water Process, which uses water extraction to remove caffeine, and the supercritical carbon dioxide process, which leverages the properties of CO2 in its supercritical state to extract caffeine. The paragraph concludes with a brief mention of the speaker's interest in visiting these processing plants.
☕️ The Impact of Decaf Processing on Coffee Quality
This section discusses the effects of decaffeination on the coffee bean's structure and the subsequent challenges in roasting and brewing. The initial steps of decaffeination make the beans more porous, which alters their roasting dynamics and can lead to a misleading appearance of roast level. The speaker uses a roast color analyzer to demonstrate the discrepancy between the exterior and interior roast levels of decaf beans. They also touch upon the higher polyphenol content in decaf coffee, which can contribute to health benefits, especially for those sensitive to caffeine.
🌡️ The Challenge of Freshness in Decaf Coffee
The speaker emphasizes the importance of freshness in decaf coffee due to its increased porosity, which allows air and oxygen to enter the beans more easily, accelerating staleness. They advise using a freezer to preserve decaf beans and to purchase from roasters who prioritize the quality of their decaf offerings. The paragraph also addresses the common practice of cafes not investing in decaf, which can result in lower quality options for consumers. The speaker suggests engaging with coffee communities to find high-quality decaf and stresses the need for proper grinding and brewing techniques.
🗣️ Community Engagement and Personal Experiences with Decaf
In the concluding paragraph, the speaker invites viewers to share their recommendations and experiences with decaf coffee in the comments section. They also express interest in visiting decaf processing plants and encourage viewers to provide feedback on what they'd like to see in future videos. The speaker thanks the sponsor, CoPilot, and provides a link for viewers to try the fitness app, emphasizing the importance of community and personal exploration in the world of coffee.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Decaf
💡Decaffeination
💡Caffeine
💡Benzene
💡Ethyl Acetate
💡Swiss Water Process
💡Supercritical Carbon Dioxide
💡Polyphenols
💡Freshness
💡Roasting
Highlights
Decaf coffee is a controversial topic with some coffee enthusiasts preferring not to consume it.
Most decaf coffee served in places is often disappointing in taste, but it can be amazing if prepared correctly.
Decaf drinkers are considered the purest of coffee drinkers as they drink it for the taste rather than the caffeine.
The history of decaffeination dates back to 1905 with Ludwig Roselius, a German coffee trader.
Early decaffeination processes used benzene, which is now known to be a carcinogen and is no longer used.
There are three main categories of decaffeination processes: solvent-based, water-based, and supercritical carbon dioxide.
Methylene chloride or dichloromethane is a successor to benzene and is used in some decaffeination processes.
Ethyl acetate, derived from sugarcane, is a naturally occurring chemical used in the 'Sugarcane Process' for decaffeination.
The Swiss Water Process involves using hot water to extract caffeine from green coffee beans.
Supercritical carbon dioxide is used to extract caffeine because it acts as a solvent under specific temperature and pressure.
Decaf coffee is often described as 99.7% caffeine-free, but it still contains a small amount of caffeine.
Decaf coffee has higher levels of chlorogenic acids, which are beneficial for gut health.
Decaf coffee often tastes bad because the decaffeination process disrupts the coffee bean's structure, making it more porous.
Decaf coffee stales faster than caffeinated coffee due to its increased porosity, which allows oxygen to enter more easily.
To enjoy decaf coffee, it's crucial to ensure it's fresh, as it doesn't last as long as caffeinated coffee once roasted.
It's important to buy decaf from roasters who take pride in their decaf offerings to ensure quality.
Freezing decaf beans can help maintain their freshness, as decaf coffee ages quickly.
Transcripts
- Today we're gonna talk about decaf
because decaffeinated coffee
seems to be this weirdly controversial topic.
There's a big group of people out there
that are really kind of against decaf,
the whole Death Before Decaf crew.
And if you're one of those people watching,
well then I've got good news and bad news.
And the bad news is, I think you might be wrong,
but the good news is, well, decaf
you know, often is disappointing
and you're kind of right to be skeptical of it
because I would say most cups of decaf coffees served
in most places are a letdown, are not that good.
I wanna get into the hows and whys of decafs
because the kind of decaf drinker
to me is the top tier coffee drinker.
They are the purest of all coffee drinkers
because they're just drinking it for the taste.
They just like the taste of coffee
and they're willing to drink decaf,
disappointing decaf, often, to get there
and that feels very sad.
But the really good news is that decaf can be amazing.
It can be as good and enjoyable
as any other caffeinated coffee if you get it right.
Now, you might also be of the mindset
of like, "What's the point?
The point of coffee is caffeine!"
and I would argue a point of coffee is caffeine,
but that misses a bunch of fun
and that's kind of the whole point of this channel.
We think coffee can be really genuinely delightful
in a whole bunch of ways.
Not just how it tastes, but its history,
the whole process of making it,
coffee's great and worth exploring.
Now I want to get into why decaf is so often disappointing.
And to do that, we're gonna have to go right back
to the beginning of decaf
and then talk through the processes used
to decaffeinate coffee.
Then I wanna kind of touch on the health side of things
because I think it is a really important part
of this whole conversation.
And then, of course, we will cover
how to make delicious decaf coffee at home.
What's important, what you need to worry about,
what tends to go wrong, and what should go right.
Let's go back to 1905 in the city of Bremen in Germany
and there was a coffee trader there called Ludwig Roselius.
Now his claim is that the idea of decaf came to him
when he had a batch of raw coffee
soaked in seawater at some point,
and then afterwards when they roasted it,
he thought it tasted pretty good
and it was kind of decaffeinated.
He patented a process
where they would kind of soak the coffee beans in hot water
and then get in there with a compound called benzene
that would bind into the caffeine
as a kind of solvent and take it out.
And at the end of it, you had relatively decaffeinated
raw coffee beans that you could then roast.
And being an entrepreneur,
well, he then built a brand selling decaffeinated
roasted coffee and that brand was called Kaffee HAG.
They had another brand too, actually they started
called Sanka, which was 'sans caffeine'.
And that brand I think had much wider reach.
It was certainly popular in the US,
really pushed decaf into that market.
And most of the early marketing for decaf
was it was a healthier choice to drink a coffee
without the caffeine.
Small problem with that, benzene,
the compound they were using as a solvent in that process
turned out to be a carcinogen.
We don't do that anymore, benzene is off the table,
but that basic process
of treat the coffee bean in preparation for the extraction,
use a solvent to get at the caffeine specifically,
and then get rid of that and keep the remaining beans
to roast and drink.
That's kind of the process that we still use today.
But there's kind of three main categories of decaffeination
that I think are worth sort of talking about separately.
Before I tell you about those processes though,
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The first is actually very similar to the original process.
It's gonna be organic solvent used
to extract the caffeine from the coffee beans.
The sort of successor to benzene
was one called methylene chloride or dichloromethane.
It's the same thing.
That compound has a bunch of names.
It's a very effective way of doing it.
The process is much the same.
You might steam the beans or heat the beans up in hot water
to kind of open them up so that you can get inside them.
Green coffee beans are very dense
and if you're trying to get stuff out of the middle of them,
you've gotta do something to them to kind of open them up
to give you access chemically to the middle.
Dichloromethane isn't the most glorious
and wonderful chemical in the world.
I don't recommend consuming it.
I strongly recommend not consuming it.
You shouldn't be exposed to it in any serious quantities.
But the EPA in the US,
the Environmental Protection Agency
have a little paper on dichloromethane
and they say in a US city,
they measured three different cities.
Daily exposure to airborne dichloromethane
was 30 to about 300 micrograms per day.
Per day.
If you take a well processed kilo of decaf coffee
that's used the dichloromethane process
that might have, in total, retained in it
200 micrograms of dichloromethane,
the limit is 2000 micrograms per kilo,
but most of them are, in well run optimized plants,
are below that limit there.
So if you drank that entire kilo
and you extracted all of it in that process,
you'd be kind of at a typical day in a North American city
in terms of exposure.
It's a bad compound but the dose makes the poison.
Dichloromethane became less and less popular
because the name freaks people out
and there was a big push against it
and there is a successor to it called ethyl acetate.
That also sounds very scary,
so you don't tend to see that on bags of coffee.
What you tend to see is the Sugarcane Process listed.
Sugarcane is what's used to produce ethyl acetate.
It is a naturally occurring chemical.
It occurs in fruits,
it occurs in a bunch of different processes.
Yes, if you concentrate it down
you can use it as nail varnish remover,
but it's present in a bunch of stuff
and it's really not that scary.
It works much the same way where again,
you're gonna steam the coffee beans to open them up,
add the ethyl acetate, dissolve out the caffeine
through a number of different washes, take that away,
extract the caffeine from it
'cause that stuff's actually useful and valuable,
and then steam the coffee beans a second time
to get rid of any solvent before drying them down
and having them ready for kind of roasting.
That's actually a very common process.
It's really kind of interesting
how popular it's become recently.
There's a few different plants around the world doing it.
One of them is in Colombia, so you tend to see
a lot of Colombian coffee processed as ethyl acetate decaf.
The second kind of grouping, I suppose,
is kind of water extraction.
The Swiss Water Process
involves making a green coffee extract.
You are gonna take a very large batch of raw green coffee
and steep it aggressively in hot water
to try and leach out everything you can.
That's the caffeine
and all of the stuff that makes the flavor.
That raw coffee is no longer useful to you.
But the green coffee extract really is
because you can decaffeinate the liquid
using things like sort of active carbon rods
and then you've got a caffeine-free green coffee extract.
When you put a fresh batch of green coffee into it,
well the flavors aren't gonna leach out of the coffee bean
because they're already in equilibrium with the solution,
but the caffeine isn't.
And so the caffeine leeches out of the coffee bean
into the green coffee extract.
You do this multiple times
and it will fully decaffeinate the raw coffee.
And again, each time you're pulling out caffeine
from the green coffee extract,
that you can sell to pharmaceuticals
or to you know, beverage manufacturers.
It ends up in things like Red Bull or cellulite cream.
A lot of people like the Swiss Water Process
because it is ultimately a water-based process
and people aren't freaked out by water.
I don't really have an opinion that lines up with that.
I'm kind of open to any and all decaf methods.
They're all safe.
And I'm not gonna come down on one side of one decaf process
in this whole thing.
I'm interested in all of them.
This leaves us with our third process,
which has I think the coolest sounding name,
which is 'supercritical carbon dioxide'.
Now carbon dioxide is kind of weird.
It's one of those things that sublimates,
what a lovely word.
It goes from being a solid straight to being a gas.
You'll see it if you have a block of dry ice,
when it melts, it doesn't turn into a liquid.
To get carbon dioxide to act like a liquid,
you need to apply a specific temperature and pressure to it.
And if you get those right, it sort of acts like a liquid.
And if you mix it with water,
well then you can use that mixture
to sort of decaffeinate coffee
because the supercritical CO2
does seem to extract caffeine specifically.
This process sounds very interesting.
It doesn't tend to freak people out
because even though CO2 may not be good
in excess for the environment, it's not a scary thing.
It's in the air around us.
There's nothing terrifying about CO2 from that perspective.
Again, this is not me saying ethyl acetate
and methylene chloride are bad,
I'm just saying how people react to them.
Now I'd love to go to these plants
and look in depth at how they work
and if that's something you wanna see,
let me know down in the comments below.
Okay, so you've got your raw decaffeinated coffee
and then you roast it up.
You buy a bag of roasted beans,
you take them home, you brew a cup.
Does that coffee have zero milligrams of caffeine in it?
No.
If you look at a lot of the language around decaf,
you'll see that it's often described
as being 99.7% caffeine free.
Looking at the EU legislation specifically,
they say that of the dry coffee matter,
I presume that means the ground coffee,
it can be up to 0.3% caffeine by weight
in order to be classed as decaffeinated.
Coffee, normal caffeinated coffee,
is one to maybe 2% by weight, caffeine.
So the reduction is going from say 1 to under 0.3.
So yes, once it's below 0.3,
it is more than 99.7% caffeine free.
But that's not the reduction,
it's not reduced by 99.7%.
Now viewers of the channel may be familiar with this:
it's a caffeine meter,
it's a little device I've used over the years
to do a bunch of caffeine testing.
And interestingly, it's actually not sensitive enough
to measure decaf coffee as brewed coffee
because it's below a concentration
of 10 milligrams per hundred milliliters.
So it's definitely gonna be below 20 milligrams
for like an eight ounce cup of coffee
or a 225 ml cup of coffee.
It will typically be lower than that.
One thing we can measure though is espresso
because that's obviously much more concentrated.
So here we have 36 grams of liquid espresso
brewed from 18 grams of ground decaffeinated coffee.
In this case it was an ethyl acetate decaf.
That's not particularly important to us now.
What I'm gonna do is give it a good stir
and then pull a sample, add it to some reagent,
and then add it to this little machine
and it will give me a number
about how much caffeine is in here.
This has 13.91 milligrams per deciliter
per hundred milliliters.
And this is about a third of a deciliter
but it's four and a little bit milligrams of caffeine.
Very little caffeine for a double espresso,
which is good news.
Now I do wanna draw your attention just quickly
to this number here, the chlorogenic acid number.
Now we've never really talked about this aspect
of the analyzer on the channel before,
but chlorogenic acids are polyphenols,
they're kind of plant defense chemicals
and they're actually present in relatively high quantities
compared to caffeinated coffee, in decaf.
Now recently I did a podcast with Tim Spector.
They invited me back to the Zoe podcast.
I don't think that's out yet,
but when it is, I'll leave a link
in the description down below.
They were talking more about the importance of polyphenols
from coffee for gut health.
It's one of the ways I think in which coffee is
particularly healthy for you,
in that it's got loads of CGA, got loads of polyphenols,
so it feeds your gut and that makes you,
or helps you have a healthier gut basically.
And that has a bunch of health benefits on the back of it.
That makes decaf to me particularly interesting.
It tastes great when it's done right,
it's got loads of polyphenols in it, so it's good for me,
but there's no caffeine, which is also potentially useful
if I suffer sensitivities to caffeine,
if it delays the onset of my sleep,
or it lowers the quality of my sleep,
or it exacerbates things like anxiety for me.
So there's reasons not to drink caffeine,
but decaf lets you have a load
of the potential, theoretical health benefits of coffee
without kind of the downsides.
So why is decaf bad so often?
It turns out that first part of every process
is extremely disruptive.
The part where you kind of open up the coffee bean
changes the kind of structure
of the raw coffee irreversibly.
It makes it kind of more porous.
It looks really weird as well, let me show you.
Here we've got some Swiss Water Processed decaf coffee
and here we've got some ethyl acetate processed coffee.
The green is a very different green to most green coffee.
These are both washed coffees originally.
It's kind of interesting to see,
they don't look that much different in size.
You can see some difference between the two.
The way that these roast is totally different
to the way that normal coffee roasts, right?
Like the way that the heat transfer happens
in this very different kind of density coffee bean,
means that it's a tricky thing to roast well.
And as a result, a lot of decaf goes wrong at this stage.
And this whole thing does funny things
to the way that the coffee looks once it's roasted.
Decaf often looks a kind of different roast level
than it is inside on the outside of the coffee beans.
There's a couple of reasons for that.
One, I think the heat transfer is a part of it
and two, because it's so porous,
when it has been roasted that little bit darker,
the oils that usually don't come to the surface
until a pretty dark roast,
will come to the surface after roasting relatively quickly.
So you get these weirdly oily looking beans
that aren't that darkly roasted.
I'll try and show you this in a slightly nerdy way.
We have a roast color analyzer here
and we'll look at two different coffees.
One sort of specialty coffee, caffeinated coffee,
and we'll look at the color of the outside
and then the inside once we've ground it.
And then we'll do the same thing with a decaf coffee.
When it comes to using this little machine,
the lower the number, the darker the roast.
So with the decaf you can see, to me,
the beans look much darker than these beans,
but the ground coffee looks only fractionally darker.
And I think that's what we saw with the color testing.
Essentially the outside of a decaf coffee bean
is not as good an indicator of the color of the inside
of the coffee bean, of the ground coffee,
of the overall roast level.
But this is where it becomes truly relevant
for you brewing decaf at home.
Because this decaf is more porous.
Yes, oils are able to get to the surface more easily,
but the far bigger concern is that air, oxygen,
is able to get in to the coffee beans much more easily.
Decaf coffee stales faster than caffeinated coffee
of kind of matching roast levels
'cause the darker you roast normal caffeinated coffee,
the faster it stales.
So if you have a very dark roast of decaf
that will be stale incredibly quickly, two weeks off roast
if it's not held in a kind of oxygen free environment,
you will really taste a significant drop off
in quality and flavor.
I'd love to tell you that most cafe operators
think the same way about this kind of stuff,
that they're really paying attention to the freshness,
but often they're not.
You'll still see, you know,
small coffee shops buying large bags of decaf
and not going through them that quickly.
Decaf is as popular as cafes want it to be
in a funny sort of way.
Actually side note in researching this,
we came across one article from the eighties
from the New York Times, which claimed
that up to 25% of coffee drunk in America
at that time was decaf.
That's astonishing numbers.
I would say right now,
I had a look at Prufrock's cafe kind of figures for 2023
and four and a half percent of the drinks were decaf.
It's one of those things that often people don't buy
if it's not clearly available.
And then lots of cafe owners don't sell
because no one's asking for it.
It's a kind of chicken and egg thing that's confusing.
A lot of cafes, frustratingly, don't really invest
time and energy into decaf.
Again, their most passionate consumers
are not well-catered to.
Buying massive bulk bags of decaf
is not in the consumer's end interest.
You know, you need to invest in a good grinder.
It doesn't actually grind particularly differently
to normal caffeinated coffee.
We took a bunch of different decafs
and run them through the particle size analyzer
for a fixed grind setting
and we didn't see much difference
as long as the roast was fairly consistent.
Different roasters do grind differently,
but decaf doesn't grind substantially differently
to caffeinated coffee.
You still sometimes see people pulling out the sachet
of pre-ground decaf that is 100% guaranteed to be terrible.
You see them sort of shaking the little foil thing
into the portafilter, spilling everywhere.
That's not a cafe you wanna be drinking decaf in
or probably much coffee at all.
You know, decaf can be great,
but I don't think most coffee shops are a good benchmark
for how it should taste.
So let's wrap up with the key stuff
around great decaf at home.
First and foremost is gonna be freshness.
Use your freezer, decaf freezes really well.
All coffee beans freeze really well.
I would recommend potentially even portioning
a little portion of decaf that you might need.
And freezing them individually, as when you need them
you can kind of draw them down.
If you don't go through decaf that much,
it will keep really well in the freezer.
If you go through loads of decaf, just yeah, have a bag out.
Things like, you know, the canisters and stuff
help a little bit, but really the freezer is the best place
to keep coffee that ages quickly.
The second thing is the most difficult thing,
which is you need to buy great decaf from a roaster
that cares deeply about their decaf.
I had an experience in 2007
where I was visiting a cafe in Portland.
It was a Stumptown cafe
where they still roasted in the cafe.
And the roaster there, I was chatting
and they said, "do you want espresso?"
And I said, yes.
Brought me an espresso.
I drank it, it was delicious.
And he is like, "By the way, that's our decaf."
And that ruined me, like that was like
"Oh no, there's no excuse for decaf not to be good."
And that stuck in sort of my head from that point onwards.
I don't think that's true of all people involved
in coffee roasting and that kind of stuff.
I would say find the passionate people who are excited
to serve you decaf, sell you decaf, talk about their decaf.
You wanna find a roaster who is proud
and excited about their decaf
because then, it genuinely, it can be very good.
It's one where I would recommend being involved
in online communities who talk about coffee,
who recommend coffee from local roasters, swap tips,
who's had a good experience,
who hasn't had a good experience.
Buying great decaf is tricky,
but really that's kind of the key to this whole thing.
Well-roasted, well-sourced, well-processed decaf
is a wonderful and very enjoyable coffee to drink,
but freshness is key.
Dialing it in 'cause it will brew differently
to other coffees.
Those are the key things.
And beyond that, shockingly,
there's no extra tips or tricks.
It shouldn't be as hard as it seems to be.
But drinking decaf is really lovely.
It's become a little ritual here at the studio.
About three o'clock we brew a little batch of decaf
'cause we all like drinking coffee
and we all like sleeping well.
I don't want any caffeine after two o'clock,
but I really enjoy a little cup of decaf in the afternoon.
I just like drinking coffee,
which is probably not a great surprise.
But now I wanna hear from you down in the comments below.
Will you tell me, do you recommend decafs
that you've really, really enjoyed?
Don't use URL, don't put a link in there
because that won't work.
Just just talk about some decaf
you've really enjoyed and why.
I'd love to hear from you.
Are there other things you want to know
about the decaf process?
Do you want me to go and visit some decaf processing plans?
Would that be interesting stuff to see in the future?
I'd love to hear your thoughts down in the comments below.
Also, thank you again to CoPilot for sponsoring this video.
Don't forget about the link down in the description below
and the QR code on screen.
But for now I'll say thank you so much for watching
and hope you have a great day.
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