Steve wrote:I think there is a trade off with all
Water I find the most harmful to the final brew, but everyone has wonderful thoughts when they think of swiss water, and you can get interesting coffees from it just fewer and further between.
CO2 I find is a compromise I can accept, bean is not as "damaged"the environment is better looked after and you find some very good decafs from CO2
MC2 which is the horrible chemical method I like strangely enough I have cupped some lovely ones, but I aint drinking dry cleaning fluid
I have a bag of your Sidamo CO2 sitting in the cupboard right now, trying it tomorrow 4 days after roasting to give it a chance to nicely degas.
I tried some of the decaf costa rican from londinium, sadly wasted most of the 500g on coffee that was made by poor technique and tasted carbonic due to a lack of time to degas. Still, on day 4 I now find it very acceptable, will be interesting to compare to your stuff.
Incidentally, as a roaster and a man who knows his coffee, what do you think of the caffeine free arabica variety recently discovered?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/ ... d.research
I think, from an amateur perspective that such a variety, grown in a good location with the same artisan growing and processing found in other quality coffees, would taste very good indeed. This would negate the need for decaffeination, something I'm quite excited about.
Think we'll ever see anything come from it?
Then there's this "decaf stick" recently invented. Apparently a polymer coated stick you stir your coffee with to remove 70% of the caffeine. Still a far cry from decaf in terms of caffeine removal, but the taste would remain unadulterated. If they could get this up to 99.9% it would sell in droves.