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Are you a mod or a rocker? Eat lunch with the jocks or the burnouts? Team Edward or Team Jacob? Rest assured, one milieu in this modern era no longer demands that you choose socio-culturally defining sides: coffee. That is, whether you drink it with or without caffeine.<\/p>\n
You see, in the last few years there has been a burgeoning of specialty coffee micro-roasteries that specialize in decaf. They use green beans decaffeinated by natural methods, and as much as their caff counterparts, prioritize flavor while maintaining the same high standards in sourcing and processing. Although the bigwigs in third wave include decafs in their collections (Intelligentsia<\/a> offers a whopping four online), for this newest generation of roasteries, decaf is a starting point rather than an afterthought. The result is delicious, complex, and varied coffee that could well disarm the death-before-decaf<\/a> set and lift the Lenten gloom of those who abstain for medical reasons. Some of these roasters were once regular regular<\/em> coffee drinkers themselves, still are, and\/or simply do not dichotomize the joy of a cup\u2019s contents into caff and non-caff camps.<\/p>\n This capacity for coexistence is patently encapsulated in a tagline on the Talking Crow Coffee Roasters<\/a> website: \u201cHe drinks regular\u2014she needs decaf.\u201d Those pronouns\u2019 antecedents are Eric and Carol Blanchet, who established their Sultan, Washington-based roastery in late 2018. Their \u201cpredominately decaf\u201d business, as Carol describes it, ideally carries<\/a> three regular roasts alongside seven decafs. \u201cWe roast both so that we can compare our decaf with the regular to be sure we are spot-on with our roast profiles.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a large family (eight children) and we home educate, which makes for crazy-busy days,\u201d Carol explains via email. \u201cA few months after our last child was born, I suffered with extreme adrenal fatigue, which required, among other things, that I give up caffeine. That was really hard because I love coffee and really depended on it to function throughout the day.\u201d<\/p>\n In similar want of salubrious substitution, Kait Brown last year founded Savorista Coffee<\/a>\u00a0in Dayton, Ohio. \u201cI first fell in love with coffee as a teenage barista for Boston Stoker<\/a>,\u201d she recalls. But as an adult, a stressful period compounded by work pressures and her father\u2019s cancer compelled Brown to quit caffeine because it was exacerbating sleeplessness. Eventually, she went seeking drinkable decaf.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Colombia, at a blind cupping of decaf and caffeinated coffees, I tasted an incredible coffee. It was one of my two favorites on the table, the flavor notes were really complex and it had a lot of brightness,\u201d she relays by email. \u201cI was shocked to learn that this coffee was a decaf! I realized incredible decaf was possible.\u201d<\/p>\n That Colombian<\/a> was Savorista\u2019s first coffee. Nowadays, Brown is launching a remarkably berry-toned Ethiopian<\/a> decaf and \u201cactively looking for more coffees to add to our portfolio, but this has been very challenging,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m not looking for coffee that is \u2018good for a decaf.\u2019 I\u2019m looking for coffee that is incredible, full stop, and just happens to be a decaf.\u201d<\/p>\n Some decaf roasteries were born to fulfill not the founders\u2019 desires, but rather their loved ones. Peter Andrews began Sydney\u2019s Playground Roasters<\/a> in 2016, \u201cwhen my special lady gone and got herself pregnant, again,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt occurred to me that no one was really putting a strong focus on decaf for the coffee enthusiasts amongst us.\u201d<\/p>\n People who connect most with his decaf blend<\/a>, which is available in cafes around the city, comprise \u201cthe growing world of healthy-lifers, the sugar-free movement,\u201d Andrews finds, and \u201ctypical cafe-loving mums who so want to have a great coffee, but feel like they just have to go without until they ween the little one.\u201d Though decaf is something he himself has only \u201coccasionally in the afternoon or evening,\u201d he admires the loyalists\u2014included among them are his wife, presently expecting their third child.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen a customer orders decaf, they are genuinely ordering a coffee for flavor alone\u2014no buzz attached! You could put a case forward that the decaf drinker is the true coffee purist, searching for flavor and flavor alone, while the rest of us are just addicts needing a hit!\u201d he says.<\/p>\n What is more, not all decaf projects are a response to doctor\u2019s orders or an antidote to the jitters.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were visiting family in Maine and giving coffee we had roasted as a gift,\u201d Jamie Morganstern recollects of a winter holiday in 2017, when he and his partner, Sara Serino, conceptualized Dewired Coffee<\/a>. \u201cThe days are short in Maine that time of year so we were drinking a lot of decaf, especially when the sun went down. Everyone loved this ritual!\u201d<\/p>\n Today their Berkeley, California-based business offers<\/a>, on average, three types of decaf. They themselves drink it regularly, but when Morganstern blames buns in the oven, he is not referring to pregnancy<\/a>. \u201cSara is always a huge baker, so we\u2019ve pretty much gotten accustomed to having a cup [of decaf] in the evening with a plate of cookies or a slice of pie,\u201d Morganstern says via email.<\/p>\n Though their nights sound traditionally more momcore than millennial-chic, Morganstern is 33 and Serino is 32. They substantiate industry claims that decaf is having a renaissance and young people are its patrons.<\/p>\n \u201cDecaf coffee is also shedding its stigma of being a drink that only the older generation enjoys,\u201d Andrea Piccolo, a senior brand manager at leading specialty decaffeination plant Swiss Water<\/a>, tells Sprudge. \u201cWith millennials leading decaf consumption, the demand is surely to continue its upward growth.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, others attribute decaf\u2019s slow evolution thus far to the specialty scene\u2019s relative infancy.<\/p>\n \u201cMost caffeine-troubled people are not so young and outside of the interest span of these young baristas and roasters,\u201d theorizes Rob Berghmans<\/a>, who 16 years ago revolutionized Antwerp\u2019s coffee scene with his espresso bar and roastery, Caff\u00e8nation<\/a>. \u201cMe myself, I am not addicted,\u201d he says with a laugh.<\/p>\n Yet even Berghmans, ever upfront about the nature of the psychotropic he peddles\u2014his company\u2019s slogan is \u201cOne drug, one nation, one Caff\u00e8nation\u201d\u2014says they have \u201calways been roasting decaf\u201d and are lately enjoying the popularity of their new Caldono<\/a>.<\/p>\n Another playing-both-sides perspective comes courtesy of long-time San Francisco Sprudge contributor Noah Sanders. In \u201cSearching For The Dark Art Of Decaf<\/a>,\u201d Sanders reveals how during the early aughts he and fellow baristas sometimes punished \u201cthe very worst type of customers\u201d by secretly serving them decaf.<\/p>\n Questioned in 2019 about his own relationship with the substance, he admits: \u201cWhen I was a barista, I drank six cups of coffee a day until an acupuncturist told me it was undoubtedly the cause of the mildly crippling panic attacks I\u2019d been experiencing. I drank some decaf after that.\u201d These days, he notes: \u201cI try\u2014and fail\u2014to give up caffeine every six months or so and decaf is the lifeline I then cling to, but then only paired with a large-ish amount of steamed milk.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, disguise with dairy no more. At any time, sun up or sun down, you can have your coffee and drink it too. Thanks to these emergent micro-roasteries, contemporary decaf little resembles Grandpa\u2019s Sanka (though what a cute corporate portmanteau that name turns out to be: from the French for\u00a0sans caffeine<\/i><\/a>). This is certainly NYMD (not your mother\u2019s decaf). As specialty coffee grows up, the black-or-white big-gulp attitudes of yesterday are getting displaced by the nuanced fluidity of personal preference.<\/p>\n We say bring it on. Or more simply put, decaf gives us life.<\/p>\n Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more\u00a0Karina Hof on Sprudge<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n The post There\u2019s A Decaf-Only Micro-Roaster Boom Happening Right Now<\/a> appeared first on Sprudge<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Are you a mod or a rocker? Eat lunch with the jocks or the burnouts? Team Edward or Team Jacob? Rest assured, one milieu in this modern era no longer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2464,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[422,424,426,148,428,430,154,432,434,436,438,440,442,444,446,448,156,450],"tags":[63,27,65,61,59,67,31],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/2464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSource: Coffee News<\/body><\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"