The Nightwatchman: Decaf That Isn't A Punishment
By My Store Admin
Decaf has an image problem and it earned most of it.
For about forty years, decaf was where bad coffee went. Cheap beans, roasted dark to cover the damage, sat on a hotplate. If you gave up caffeine you gave up coffee, and everyone quietly accepted that.
That's not true any more. It hasn't been for a while.
Why Old Decaf Was Genuinely Bad
Two reasons, and neither was the decaffeination itself.
The beans were an afterthought. Nobody sent their best coffee to be decaffeinated. Why spend on a high-grade lot when the process was going to flatten it?
The processing was cruder. Older methods used harsher solvents and higher temperatures, and stripped out plenty of flavour alongside the caffeine.
So you had mediocre coffee, roughly treated, roasted dark to hide what was left. Of course it tasted like that.
What Changed
Modern decaffeination is a lot gentler, and speciality roasters started sending decent green coffee to be processed rather than whatever was left over.
The main methods now:
Swiss Water — beans soaked in water saturated with coffee solubles, so caffeine leaves but flavour compounds stay. No chemical solvents.
Sugarcane / EA (ethyl acetate) — uses a compound derived from fermented sugarcane, common with Colombian coffees. Tends to leave a distinct sweetness behind.
CO2 process — pressurised carbon dioxide pulls the caffeine selectively. Efficient, and increasingly common at scale.
All of them remove around 97–99% of the caffeine. None of them leave the coffee tasting of chemicals.
Decaf Is Never Actually Caffeine-Free
Worth being straight about this.
A cup of decaf typically has somewhere around 2–5mg of caffeine, against roughly 60–100mg in a regular espresso-based drink. So it's a fraction, but it isn't zero.
For nearly everyone that's irrelevant. If you're avoiding caffeine on medical advice, it's worth knowing rather than being surprised by.
Why Ours Is Called the Nightwatchman
In cricket, when a wicket falls late in the day, you send in a lower-order batsman to see out the last few overs. He's not there to score. He's there to protect the good batsmen for the morning.
That's a decaf. It's the one you have at nine in the evening so that the rest of your night still works.
Ours is Colombian, and it tastes of honey, milk chocolate and orange. That orange note is the giveaway that there's real coffee character still in there — it's the sort of thing that gets flattened out by bad processing.
It's the same roast philosophy as the No Fuss Blend. Not scorched to hide anything, because there's nothing to hide.
When to Actually Drink It
After about 2pm, if you sleep badly. Caffeine has a half-life of around five hours, so an afternoon coffee is still measurably in your system at bedtime.
The second one. Plenty of people want another coffee at eleven and don't want the jitters. Nobody says you have to pick a side.
Espresso tonic. The orange in the Nightwatchman is genuinely brilliant with tonic water, and you can have one at four in the afternoon.
When you're pregnant, cutting down, or just prefer it. None of which requires an explanation.
Brewing Decaf Is Slightly Different
Nobody tells you this, and it explains a lot of disappointing cups.
Decaffeination changes the structure of the bean. The process makes it more porous and more brittle, which has two practical consequences.
It grinds finer. The same grinder setting will produce a finer grind from decaf than from regular beans, because the beans break up more easily. On espresso that means your shot will run slower. Go one or two steps coarser than usual as a starting point.
It extracts faster. More porous beans give up their flavour more readily, so decaf is easier to over-extract. Slightly cooler water helps — around 90°C rather than 94°C on filter methods.
There's a third thing worth knowing: decaf beans look darker than they are. The process darkens them before roasting even begins, so you can't judge the roast level by colour the way you would with regular coffee. A decaf that looks quite dark may well be a medium roast.
If you've written decaf off, it was probably fair when you did it. Try one that was treated as a real coffee and see.
Order the Nightwatchman whole bean or ground — same as everything else, roast date on the bag.
No worries, bru.
no worries, bru coffee co. | noworriesbrucoffee.co.uk