Finally was able to assemble friends together to do the tasting for James Hoffman's Decaf Project. It was really fun! Each kit was made with the same source beans, decaffeinated through the 3 main processes, plus an unprocessed control, then roasted by the same roaster. (Not all sample kits use the same source beans or the same roaster, however. The logistics of that just weren't practical.)
As someone who really needs to mostly drink decaf, it was really interesting to directly compare the results. My group unanimously thought the water process was weak and terrible, but split on rather ethyl acetate or CO2 was better. Each of those removed some of the more interesting notes from the control, but it was really just personal preference for which of those notes we liked more.
It also reinforced my belief that, while decaffeination does slightly reduce quality, the vast majority of crappy decaf is crappy because people don't bother to brew it properly.
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@attoparsec That begs the question in this case: How did you brew it?🙂
That does sound like fun though! I'll be curious if they decide to do it again. Neat!
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@glitch25 24 grams of beans and 400 ml of boiling water, following the recommendations. We didn't have a fancy grinder, unfortunately, but tried to keep everything as uniform as possible.
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@attoparsec Pour over? French press?
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@glitch25 French press. Pour over probably would have been better, but we were concerned about consistency.
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