Why does most decaf taste so bad?

It's a common perception that decaf tastes worse than regular coffee. Regular coffee drinkers have even come up with some clever jokes about it. "There's a time and place for decaf. Never and in the trash." "My wife made decaf without telling me. That's grounds for divorce."

While we'd like to believe that this decaf-phobia is just a side effect of caffeine addiction, the sad truth is that a lot of decaf does taste pretty terrible. Americans, in particular, have been sold stale, flat, weak, bitter, and just plain undrinkable decaf for decades. But it doesn't have to be that way!

There are two primary reasons that decaffeinated coffee in America has traditionally had subpar taste.

The decaffeination process

There's no such thing as a decaf coffee tree. Decaf beans start just like all the other beans, growing inside a coffee cherry on a coffee tree, full of caffeine. It's only after the fruit is picked and the beans are hulled and milled that they're sent off for decaffeination.

Removing caffeine from a coffee bean is easy because caffeine is water-soluble. Just soak a coffee bean in water, and the caffeine will come out. Unfortunately, many of the bean's most important flavor compounds are also water-soluble, so you need some way to separate the two.

For many years, the primary decaffeination process was the Methylene Chloride (or "MC") process. Methylene chloride acts as a solvent, attracting the caffeine molecules. When the solvent is heated, the methylene chloride/caffeine solution evaporates, leaving a caffeine-free bean. Unfortunately, some of those flavor compounds also leave and some of the chemical flavor stays behind.

This process not only creates bad coffee, it creates bad workplaces. In fact, the US government banned the use of MC in most workplaces in 2024. Thankfully, there are now chemical-free decaffeination processes that don't strip the bean of it's flavor compounds. Freestyle will never offer any MC process coffee.

The supply chain and market forces

Before decaf coffee can land at your grocery store or your local coffee shop, before it can even be imported, it has to be shipped to a decaffeination plant. The vast majority of decaffeination occurs in one of two plants - Descamex in Vera Cruz, Mexico and Swiss Water in Vancouver, British Columbia. 

While the regular beans can ship straight from the farm to the importer, most decaf beans make an extra trip to Mexico or Canada before coming to the US. There is a lot of cost in this shipping and logistics and extra border-crossing, and there is cost in the decaffeination process itself.

Since US coffee drinkers weren't ready to pay a premium for decaf coffee, the only way to keep decaf at a reasonable retail price was to start with cheaper beans. For decades, it was the beans with lower market value - the ones that were lower quality to start with - that were sent off to decaffeination.

Fortunately, for the health-conscious decaf drinker, decaf demand has increased dramatically, making higher quality, chemical-free decaf beans available. They're still not easy to find, but Freestyle is constantly monitoring the global trade for the best decaf available.