How to Distinguish Decaf Coffee Beans? How to Roast Decaf Coffee Beans? Decaf Coffee Market Development Trends

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The Growing Demand for Decaf Coffee

With the accelerated development of the coffee market and customers' continuously increasing requirements for quality, improving roasting quality, especially ensuring the product quality of decaf coffee, has become the biggest challenge faced by all coffee roasters.

According to statistics, in 2017, the total consumption growth rate of decaf coffee exceeded that of regular coffee. Among them, in Western Europe and Canada, young consumers aged 18-24 are the main consumers of decaf coffee. Young consumers are willing to try different types of specialty coffee, and high-quality, delicately flavored decaf coffee is also what they pursue.

Essential Knowledge About Decaf Coffee

The roasting methods for decaf coffee beans have always been a perplexing problem for roasters. Let's take a look at "Several things you must know about deaf coffee."

01 - Does Decaf Coffee Look Different?

Whether decaf coffee is raw or roasted beans, its appearance is very different from regular coffee. This difference often troubles roasters. Therefore, to ensure the roasting quality of decaf coffee, you first need to be familiar with and master the appearance characteristics of decaf coffee.

Classic Swiss Water® processed decaf coffee has a deeper and matte green color. During the roasting process, decaf coffee will still appear darker than regular coffee. Therefore, we cannot judge the degree of coffee roasting through traditional visual methods, but need to use other methods, such as detecting internal color or surface texture.

But be careful, surface texture also has its pitfalls. Chemically processed decaf coffee, such as coffee treated with ethyl acetate or dichloromethane, will show gloss even in very light roasting stages; water-processed decaf coffee will remain matte even in dark roasting stages. To ensure the quality of decaf coffee, you must understand the various appearance differences between decaf coffee and regular coffee to avoid falling into visual traps that lead to misjudgment of coffee roasting degree.

02 - How to Determine the Roast Level of Decaf Coffee

"My experience is that until the first crack, I rely more on thermocouples than the appearance of coffee, because decaf coffee is darker in color from the beginning. Therefore, I will use thermocouples and smell (of course, hearing as well, but mostly smell) to judge and calculate the maturity time and roasting termination temperature of the coffee."

In the final analysis, the importance of coffee appearance is far less than taste, so we'd better abandon visual biases and judge the final quality of coffee through cupping results, letting taste decide everything.

03 - Treat Your Decaf Coffee Gently

Before roasting, decaf coffee has already undergone multiple processing procedures, so you must treat your decaf coffee gently. All decaf processing methods include rehydration and dehydration processes, which will greatly change the internal structure and water retention capacity of coffee, thereby affecting coffee roasting. Usually, decaf coffee dehydrates faster, which will greatly affect the "first crack" of coffee.

I think the most important thing is that many roasters don't know how different the moisture content of decaf coffee is. They think decaf coffee is the same as regular coffee. Only by understanding this can you correctly roast decaf coffee.

Decaf coffee roasting must be gentle, not too hasty, otherwise moisture will be completely lost, and you need to accurately apply the remaining moisture in the coffee.

Decaf processing changes the internal structure of coffee, so I will slow down the coffee roasting process with slow, uniform heating. We usually adopt a lower roasting termination temperature to ensure higher maturity of coffee and ensure a perfect balance of acidity and sweetness. We will quickly reduce the heating rate, but the process of lower heat must be uniform to ensure the perfect maturity of coffee.

04 - Strive to Improve Quality

The most important thing - ensure the highest quality of decaf coffee, so that decaf coffee can gain more attention and love. Roasting, cupping, adjusting, repeating - this is the unchanging rule for all baristas when roasting a batch of beans. Currently, all roasters launch dozens of new coffee products every year, while decaf coffee has fewer than 3-4 varieties. We need to invest more energy in decaf coffee to let more consumers feel the charm of decaf coffee.

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Important Notice :

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