There's a version of decaf coffee that most of us grew up with. It came in a jar, smelled faintly of chemicals, and tasted like the memory of coffee rather than the thing itself. It was what you made for a guest who couldn't have caffeine, apologetically, while quietly being grateful it wasn't you.
That version still exists, unfortunately. But it has nothing to do with what we're talking about here.
Specialty decaf — done properly, by roasters who actually care — is one of the more underrated things in coffee right now. The beans start life as the same high-grade, single-origin lots you'd find in any serious roastery's regular range. The decaffeination happens after harvest, before roasting, using processes that have improved dramatically in the last decade. And when the roaster does their job well, what ends up in your cup is something that tastes like a real, considered coffee — not an absence of one.
We keep a small decaf shelf rather than a token single option. Here is what is on it, and why we chose it.
Manhattan Coffee Roasters — El Vergel Decaf (Colombia)
Finca El Vergel sits in Tolima, Colombia, at around 1,450 metres, run by brothers Elias and Shady Bayter. Over the last decade they have built one of the most respected names in experimental Colombian coffee — the farm turns up in the ranges of roasters across Europe, usually attached to some piece of fermentation work nobody else is attempting.
What makes this lot unusual is the order of operations. The Red and Yellow Caturra is processed as a natural — dried whole in the fruit — and only then decaffeinated, using sugarcane-derived ethyl acetate. Most decaf starts life as a washed coffee, because washed lots are more predictable and there is less to lose in the process. Running a natural through decaffeination means starting with far more fruit character and betting that enough of it survives.
Enough of it survives. Manhattan roast it for espresso, and it comes through as sweet baked apple, prunes and dark chocolate — round, sweet and substantial enough to hold its own with milk. It is the kind of shot you would happily pull for someone without mentioning it was decaf, not as a trick, but because it genuinely holds its own.
Nomad Coffee — Chambakú Decaf (Colombia)
Finca Chambakú is one of the farms Nomad returns to year after year — a sign, in specialty coffee, that the relationship is working and the quality is consistent. The farm is run by Felipe Restrepo in Colombia, and the coffee is processed washed before being decaffeinated using ethyl acetate from sugarcane molasses, the same process used for the El Vergel, applied to a very different starting point.
Nomad roast the Chambakú as an omni — meaning it's developed to work across brew methods, whether you're pulling it as an espresso or brewing it long as a filter. That flexibility is genuinely useful for a decaf, where people's brewing habits tend to vary more than with their regular coffee.
Nomad describe notes of 80% dark chocolate and muscovado sugar, with a gentle acidity and a slight finish of golden apple. As a filter it's clean and easy to drink; as an espresso it sits particularly well with milk — a flat white made with the Chambakú at the right extraction is a genuinely satisfying thing, with none of the thin, slightly hollow quality that cheaper decafs tend to produce in milk drinks.
Felipe updated the drying process for the 2023 harvest — switching from traditional drying to mechanical silos to improve humidity control — and the result is a more stable, more expressive cup with better shelf life. It's the kind of detail that most producers wouldn't bother with. The fact that it happened tells you something about how seriously Felipe takes his coffee.
TANAT — El Sueño (Mexico)
The third is the outlier, and deliberately so. TANAT's El Sueño comes from Chiapas in southern Mexico, above 1,200 metres, a washed blend of Typica, Bourbon and Caturra — and it is a water-process decaf rather than an EA one.
That makes it a useful thing to taste against the other two. It is the most conventional cup of the three, dark chocolate and caramel, without the fruit the EA lots keep hold of. It is also the least expensive decaf we stock, which is the honest trade: a clean, straightforward decaf that does not pretend to be a showpiece.
A Note on the EA Process
Two of these coffees use ethyl acetate decaffeination, which is worth understanding briefly because it's genuinely different from what most people imagine when they think of how decaf is made.
The two older methods — chemical solvent decaffeination using methylene chloride, and the Swiss Water Process — are still widely used. Methylene chloride is effective but strips flavour. The Swiss Water Process is chemical-free but uses water as the solvent, which also carries away a significant portion of the aromatic compounds that make specialty coffee interesting.
EA decaffeination uses ethyl acetate, which occurs naturally in fruit and is derived here from sugarcane or sugarcane molasses. It's selective — it binds to caffeine molecules more readily than to the flavour compounds — which means more of the original character of the bean survives. It's more expensive and more delicate to handle than the alternatives, which is why you don't see it everywhere. You tend to find it at roasters who care enough to source decaf with the same rigour they apply to everything else.
Who Actually Drinks Specialty Decaf?
More people than you might think. The obvious answer is anyone who's sensitive to caffeine — people who love coffee but feel it in their sleep, their anxiety, their heart rate. That's a large and growing group, and they've historically been badly served by the options available to them.
But the more interesting answer is: people who want a second or third coffee in the afternoon without consequences. People who are pregnant. People who drink coffee primarily for the ritual and the taste rather than the hit. People who entertain and want to offer something genuinely good to guests who don't drink caffeine.
The UK decaf market has grown quietly and consistently for years, and the quality ceiling has risen with it. These coffees sit near that ceiling.
The full decaf selection is here. If you're not sure where to start: the El Vergel is the one with the most fruit behind it, the Chambakú is the one to reach for if you're primarily making milk drinks, and the El Sueño is the straightforward everyday one.