Decaf Coffee Beans
Decaf Coffee Beans, Roasted Fresh in Adelaide
Roast-dated decaf from independent Adelaide roasters, ground to suit how you brew. One bag from $24, or a subscription from $30. Free shipping Australia wide.
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Allways Coffee sends fresh, roast-dated decaf from independent Adelaide roasters. A single bag starts at $24 for 250g, or a subscription from $30 every 2, 4 or 6 weeks. The decaf changes with each roaster in the rotation, so you are not stuck with the same one forever. Free shipping Australia wide, no lock-in.
Most places sell you one decaf. The same lot, the same process, until it runs out. That is fine until you realise decaf has as much range as anything else and you have been drinking one version of it for two years.
We rotate. Every roaster who comes through brings their own decaf, so the bag you get in March is not the bag you get in June. Same freshness, different coffee.
How to buy it
One bag, nothing recurring. Good if you are cutting back rather than giving up, or you just want to see how it drinks before committing to anything.
Buy a single bag →Set it and forget it. Fresh decaf turns up on your schedule, from whichever Adelaide roaster is in the rotation. Skip, swap or pause whenever you need to.
Set up a subscription →Decaf as one of your two roast profiles, alongside an espresso blend or a single origin. For households where one person has quit caffeine and the other very much has not.
See Half and Half →Every bag is roast-dated and ground to your brew method, or left whole if you own a grinder. Choose espresso, stovetop, AeroPress, plunger, pour over, batch brew or cold brew at checkout.
Eight roasters, and nearly all of them went to Colombia
We have run decaf from eight different Adelaide roasters across the last nine releases. Going back through them turned up something we did not expect.
Three of them, sourcing completely separately, landed on coffee from the same Colombian town. Vice, Elusive and Bobby's all put up a decaf out of Apía in Risaralda. Not the same country, not the same region, the same municipality. Nobody coordinated that.
Widen it out and the pattern holds. Seven of the eight were Colombian or part-Colombian. Two Fish went to Inza in Cauca at 1,800 to 2,100 metres, Kindred to Montalvo in Tolima at 1,800. Only Dawn Patrol went elsewhere entirely, to Chiapas in Mexico. Peninsula split the difference and blended a Mexican lot with a Colombian one.
None of that is a coincidence, and the reason is in how the caffeine gets removed.
How decaf actually gets made
Almost every decaf we have sent used ethyl acetate from fermented sugarcane. Six of the eight outright, and half of a seventh. The green beans get soaked and steamed until the cells swell open, then bathed in the solution, which bonds to the caffeine and carries it out. Then rinsed, dried, packed.
Colombia grows sugarcane. Colombia grows coffee. So the process and the origin travel together, which is most of the reason a decaf shelf in Australia looks the way it does.
The other one we have run is the Mountain Water Process, twice. Dawn Patrol's Chiapas lot and half of Peninsula's blend both came through Descamex, where water drawn from Pico de Orizaba pulls the caffeine out and puts everything else back. No solvent touches the bean at any point.
What about Swiss Water?
You will see Swiss Water on most decaf sold in Australia, and it is a good process. It is water-based, uses green coffee extract and carbon filtration, and no solvent goes near the bean.
We have not run one. Not because there is anything wrong with it, but because the roasters we work with have gone with sugarcane EA and Mountain Water instead. If a Swiss Water lot comes through the rotation we will say so. We are not going to put it on the page because it sells well.
Does the decaf actually taste like anything
Yes, and the tasting notes from the last few are the argument. Kindred's came through as brown sugar and orange citrus. Dawn Patrol's as cooked apple and butterscotch. Peninsula's leaned molasses and marmalade. Elusive's had berries and pineapple in it, which is not a sentence people expect about decaf.
Brown sugarCooked appleMolassesMilk chocolateMarmaladeButterscotch
The thing that ruins decaf is the same thing that ruins everything else. It sits too long. Supermarket decaf turns over slowly because fewer people buy it, so it is often the stalest bag on the shelf. Roast-dated and shipped straight from the roaster fixes most of what people think they dislike about decaf.
Decaf, answered
Is there such a thing as a decaf coffee bean?
Not on the tree. Decaf is regular coffee with the caffeine taken out after harvest and before roasting, while the beans are still green. So a decaf bean starts as an ordinary coffee bean from an ordinary farm, and everything about where it grew and how it was processed still matters.
Are decaffeinated coffee beans any good?
The good ones are very good, and the bad ones are usually bad for boring reasons rather than because they are decaf. Cheap decaf tends to use low-grade green coffee, because nobody wants to spend money on beans they are about to strip. Specialty decaf starts with coffee worth drinking in the first place. Freshness matters more here than almost anywhere, since decaf sells slowly and sits longer.
What are the best decaf coffee beans in Australia?
Depends entirely on how you brew and what you like, and anyone naming one bean is selling it to you. What we would say is look for two things on the bag: a roast date, and a named origin and process. If a decaf will not tell you where it came from or how the caffeine was removed, that is usually because the answer is not interesting.
Is there a downside to decaffeinated coffee?
On flavour, the honest answer is that decaffeination does soften things slightly. Some of the acidity and a bit of the top-end brightness gets rounded off in the process, which is why a lot of decaf reads sweeter and heavier than its caffeinated equivalent. Good sourcing and a fresh roast close most of that gap. It does not close all of it.
How much caffeine is left in decaf?
Decaffeination removes most but not all of it. A cup of decaf still carries a small amount, so it is not a zero-caffeine drink. If you need genuinely none of it, decaf is not the answer.
Can I get decaf ground for my machine?
Yes. Choose your grind at checkout: whole bean, espresso, stovetop, AeroPress, plunger, pour over, batch brew or cold brew. If you need something specific, add a note to your order and we will sort it.
Do you deliver decaf outside Adelaide?
Yes. Free shipping Australia wide. We dispatch weekly and most orders land within a few days of roasting.
Decaf worth drinking after 3pm
Roast-dated decaf from independent Adelaide roasters, ground how you brew. One bag from $24, or a subscription from $30. Free shipping Australia wide, no lock-in, skip or swap whenever.
Buy decaf →