Description
This decaf is pretty impressive.
Usually we dish up decaffeinated coffees as single origins because either way the flavour is already so distorted it was hard to make any complex flavoured blends with them. However, we decided to give it a shot and see what would happen with swiss water decaf, as we had heard that the swiss water process leaves the coffees flavour fully in tact.
Turns out, they were right!
This coffee is absolutely fantastic and actually produces beautiful crema! I didn’t think I’d ever say that about a decaf, but there is a first time for everything.
Expect a certain silky, full bodied texture with a rich cocoa and spices flavour.
So what is swiss water decaf?
The swiss water process was purpose designed to avoid contamination of the coffee beans. In order to extract the caffeine from coffee, there are usually chemicals involved that help with stripping the stimulant from the coffee beans. In the case of swiss water decaf it relies purely on the solubility of water and osmosis in order to remove the caffeine.
Funnily enough, in the process they use green coffee extract to pull the caffeine from the green coffee beans sort of like a magnet. As the green coffee is highly caffeinated and the GCE is not caffeinated, it naturally sucks the caffeine out. Once the GCE is believed to be fully saturated, they will percolate it through carbon filters which will extract the caffeine from the GCE without harming any of the other molecules, allowing for it to be run again and again until the coffee beans are stripped of sufficient caffeine.
This is a really long process, taking 8-10 hours to achieve a 0.01% caffeine content.
