tastes bad

ppl like being elitist and judgey about the darnedest things

The real reason is that coffee snobs also have a chemical dependency on caffeine. Every other dunk against decaf is because they want coffee as a drug. (And that's okay-- but it's worth putting on the table.)

That said, as someone who loves decaf, it just has less flavor. The "processing" step to dry the coffee is one of the most important factors in taste, but the choice of processing is how a bean is made decaf. So, you can't process a coffee under the "natural" process and have decaf beans.

For years, there wasn't a lot of investment into decaf processing, either in terms of the quality of beans used or in experimentation with decaf. So, the height of flavor that decaf could reach had been underexplored.

All those factors combined means the coffee snobs of the world will avoid decaf, and it earns an unfair derision.

But! This has changed! There's really good decaf out there!

There's thermal shock process, which includes the fermentation step used in some zanier processing. There's the sugarcane process, which uses ethyl acetate. And the traditional swiss water process (just rinse the caffeine out) is still good! There are really good decaf beans out there.

So, the true coffee snobs are with you on this. Decaf was great even before the recent innovations in decaf processing. You can have all the science-lab fun of brewing coffee, but you can drink literal gallons of it over the course of a day.

Aside: There are even roasters out there suggesting they have a natural process decaf? I'd never heard about that before, and that's "big if true". They might just be using natural as an adjective rather than a name, since some decaffeination methods use chemical solvents.

Sorry for writing an essay under your post. I love coffee so much and decaf is great.

tldr: I agree with you, decaf was always good, but has gotten way way better recently. The people who are mean about decaf (1) probably have a caffeine dependency (I sure do!) or (2) are adopting the culture of derision that grew up back when decaf beans used to always be less flavorful.

I'm going to add another essay under this post to advocate for nail-polish processed coffee.

For decades, the gold decaf standard used to be the swiss water process. Caffeine is one of the most water soluble parts of the coffee bean. It works by (1) rinsing green coffee beans in hot water to make something of a coffea tea, (2) filtering the caffeine out of that tea, and then (3) using that cooled tea to rinse the caffeine out of a new batch of coffee.

But chemical solvents work much better, and today, ethyl acetate is one of the best. I drink decaf coffee processed using ethyl acetate. It's a chemical solvent, but it makes for a noticeable difference.

It helps that the US has more lax standards for what constitutes decaf. A cup of coffee that would be 100mg can instead have something like 5mg, while the EU demands something vanishingly close to zero. Getting those last 5mg means a more aggressive processing.

unless it’s shit coffee it tastes good these days! but caffeinated shit coffee tastes bad too!

hates freedom

Literally