My name is Mike Jones, and I'm a barista at
Third Rail Coffee right by Washington Square
Park in New York City.
I'm going to teach you some basic coffee-making
skills.
What is decaffeinated coffee?
Decaf coffee actually still has some caffeine
in it.
Definitely less, to a significant amount,
than you know, regular caffeinated coffee,
but it still is there.
So if you have a severe caffeine intolerance,
I just wouldn't touch it.
And it's also kind of strange how it happens.
There are a few different ways, either by
just soaking it in water or adding some solvents
but you actually remove the caffeine from
the beans.
More specifically you remove everything from
the beans.
The flavor, the different oils and caffeine.
Once you have that in a water mixture, you
take out the caffeine by some advanced scientific
process that I can't speak to you.
And then you impart that flavor back into
the beans without the caffeine in it.
It definitely takes out a little bit of flavor
that you would want to be there.
And this is all done by second party companies,
not the roaster nor the farm.
Lots of times a roaster will buy a lot of
coffee from a farm and send some off to be
decaffeinated and then shipped back to them.
So you can have decaf espresso, you can have
regular decaf coffee.
And if you make it fresh to order, it can
still be very rewarding.
What's kind of exciting is in recent years
there have been, at least in Brazil, farms
trying to genetically alter coffee so that
it can be grown with little to no caffeine.
Right now it's kind of prohibitively expensive,
but it will be interesting to see in the future
what happens with that.
