Our decaf is so easy to roast, it roasts itself!
Not exactly, but we have been hard at work making Swiss Water® Decaffeinated coffees easier to roast consistently well. In addition to being decaffeinators we are roasters, and in our cupping room we roast our samples on a six barrel Jabez Burns and larger roasts on a Diedrich IR-3. What we have noticed is that at the same ground colour, the external colour of our decaf roast is much closer to the external roast colour of the original green coffee than it was in the past.
Swiss Water® Decaffeinated coffees are slightly darker in its green form than non-decaffeinated green coffee, so you have to approach it slightly differently in a roaster. I find the decaf green coffee to follow a similar pattern of colour change as the original green coffee, but at each stage in the roast our decaf will be slightly darker. This is along the lines of the difference between Pantone 100 PC and 103PC for an early phase of the roast.
As the decaf coffee is roasting it will expand, show its veins, expand some more, even out on the surface, and expand some more like a normal green coffee, but along the way the colour will be a little bit darker. (The picture below is of a recent decaf production of FTO Peru.) We follow similar roast profiles for the decaf green and original green coffees and don’t find a need to treat one or the other very differently.
Don’t be afraid to roast our decaf as light as your non-decaffeinated coffees. After every decaffeination we roast up the original green and the decaffeinated green and cup them side by side, and we roast them to the same sample roast level and we work hard to make sure there are no negative flavours because of the decaffeination process.
Category: Coffee Industry
Comments: 4
“We follow similar roast profiles for the decaf green and original green coffees and don’t find a need to treat one or the other very differently.”
Your quote. Yet your SWP Blog suggests using a lower charge temp of 25-30 degrees less. I am confused. What do you recomend, lower charge temp or the same for decaf as any green coffe ? chris
We have been really pleased with the latest advances with Swiss Water Decaffeinated coffee. We recently had you decaffeinate our Triple Certified, Organic,Fair Trade, and Smithsonian “Bird-friendly” La Florida and it is impeccable!
Thanks for your efforts. It was scary sending off such a great coffee for decaffeination but the results justified our “leap of faith”.
Hi Chris- roasting is all about making the flavour of your coffee enjoyable. So if you are charging at a lower temperature for decafs than non-decafs and love the taste, there is no reason to change. If you are feeling like you aren’t getting all that you can out of your decafs, I think you are safe to try a higher charge temperature. We are planning a trial to collect more formal data on charge temperature’s effect on taste, and once that is done we will change our Producing Great Coffee page.
Randy- thank you for the kind words and the leap of faith!
Mike