How popular is decaf among coffee nerds? Out of an aversion to caffeine, I've never drunk coffee. Except for that one time I mistook it for hot chocolate.
I had to drink it on and off over the past year when I couldn’t have caffeine for medical reasons.
My experience has been… mixed.
Fundamentally my view of the problem is that there’s not enough effort being put in to produce good decaf offerings across the board. It’s a shame, because I think it could be a lot better if roasters cared more, but obviously they won’t if there’s not enough consumer demand.
Most of the really good roasters I was buying caffeinated coffee from only have one decaf option, which gets rotated once every blue moon. Meanwhile they will sell multiple caffeinated bean options, which get changed up at least once a month. Within that, a lot of those decaf offerings I tried were super bland and had boring flavour notes.
Square Mile makes the best decaf coffee from the UK roasters I tried by a country mile (and I tried a
lot). It actually had some winey, fruity, third wave flavours beyond ‘coffee, chocolate, nuts’.
They still only had that one option though, and most frustratingly, they have no subscription service for decaf, so you either have to order a bag every single time and pay postage, or buy a large bag and decant it into freezer bags yourself.
I’m back on caffeine now and I am pretty relieved about it!