It's getting easier to find good decaf coffee. Here's how a Providence coffee shop does it
I recently tuned in to the History Channel for an afternoon of episodes on "The Food that Built America." This documentary series offers some interesting entrepreneurial stories about the men and women who created iconic products in American history.
"Coffee: A Brewed Awakening" caught my attention. It brought back memories and tickled my nostalgia bone. It was about how coffee in America was brought to the masses.
It was the percolator, the first home brewing machine for coffee in America. My mother had an electric one that she plugged in. My nana had a glass one she put on her gas stove to heat. They pumped boiling water up from the bottom of the pot over a perforated basket of ground coffee at the top, over and over.
It was how people made coffee in the 1960s and early '70s. My mother-in-law made it that way right through the early 2000s because it was the only way to get the really burning hot coffee she and my father-in-law favored.
Ways to make coffee have changed greatly over the years.
Percolators often produced bitter coffee. It also wasn't really an efficient method, going against gravity. But it was the standard for a long run.
Restaurants and cafes like Dunkin' made much better-tasting coffee. That's because they had commercial-grade Bunn-O-Matics. Hot water poured over the ground coffee, once.
Bringing good coffee to the masses
Two real estate developers, Vincent Marotta Sr. and Samuel Glazer, engaged two engineers to help them create a similar coffee machine for the home that would maintain a steady water temperature of 200 degrees, sent over coffee grounds and into a glass carafe. Mr. Coffee was the result. The first ones sold for $39.99 in 1972.
A Mr. Coffee machiine photographed for its 25th anniversary. It was the first automatic drip coffee for home use. Baseball great Joe DiMaggio was the pitchman.
It will always be debated whether the machine would have attained such sales without the star spokesman, retired New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio.
It's a great story how Marotta, a former baseball player, flew into San Francisco and showed up at the door of DiMaggio to make his pitch. At his door! What I had never heard before was that DiMaggio had long stopped drinking coffee because of ulcers.
Whether it was the coffee or the pitchman, Mr. Coffee became all the rage. More than a million were sold within three years.
Innovation followed with K-Cups. Those with access to all their favorite coffee flavors at the office, wanted the same at home. The Keurig was born.
Of course, today we are in a golden age of coffee with options from simple pour-overs to expensive espresso machines. Every home can be a coffee shop if its occupants so wish.
The local buzz on decaffeinated coffee
One innovation many don't fully understand is decaffeinated coffee. If the point of your morning coffee is to get you going for the day, why remove the fuel?
What of the people who love the taste of coffee, or the ritual of brewing and drinking it, but don't want the caffeine? It's not recommended for pregnant women. Some people have health issues that make drinking coffee with caffeine inadvisable. For others, it disturbs their sleep.
It's getting easier today to find good decaf, said Rik Kleinfeldt, who's been innovating with Providence New Harvest Coffee Roasters for 24 years.
Growing up in Dayton, Ohio, Kleinfeldt only knew about instant coffee for daily drinking and perked coffee for company. His ah-ha moment came when he was an exchange student in Greece during high school. He came to Providence for graduate school and worked at the Coffee Connection, where he learned a lot from owner Charles Fishbein.
He found a career path when he started New Harvest. His first focus was to introduce small farm light roasts or their complex flavor notes of apple, grape and citrus. That meant coffee from farms that might grow 1,500 pounds and dry and process it on their own.
That small farm connection has stayed with him as part of his Source Direct program. He buys beans directly from farmers and partners.
Decaffeinated coffee requires a water process to remove the caffeine. The farmers don't decaffeinate themselves, he said. They send their beans, the same ones they ship to him and other roasters, to processing in Mexico.
"It's a proprietary process so there is only so much I know," Kleinfeldt said. But he explained it as best he could.
The beans are soaked in very hot water. Then the water is filtered through charcoal to separate the caffeine and flavor components. The caffeine removed in the process is sent to cola plants in the United States to use in soft drinks.
The water with the flavor components is recombined with the raw coffee beans. That's where the magic, and the proprietary details, come into play.
The result is 130-pound bags of beans that arrive at New Harvest. He roasts them and those are his decaf coffees. They start with the same beans from Guatemala and Honduras that he roasts with caffeine.
Customers can buy the decaffeinated roasts for home brewing. He offers four in the decaf collection: Organic Café, Marika Bold Blend, Maya City Roast, Cycledrome Mild Blend and Organic French Roast.
In their cafe, he offers decaf Americano, which has decaf espresso with hot water. He doesn't brew the decaf because it would be wasteful. They don't let it sit for more than an hour.
"This way, you get a fresh cup of coffee every time," he said.
"The process has evolved over the past 25 years to be the best way to remove caffeine and preserve the tasting notes," Kleinfeldt said. "We are always pleasantly surprised when we do our tastings."
That wasn't true in the late 20th century. Then he noted decaf "was rough and a pale approximation of what coffee should taste like."
"The quality is there now," he said.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: It's getting easier to find good decaf coffee. Here's how a Providence coffee shop does it
