Coffee is important to me.
When we opened our Airbnb, I included the word “coffee” (as in “this is an ideal place to drink coffee”) in virtually every picture I posted.
It used to have to have caffeine. Not that I always needed, or even wanted, the energy, but because it tastes so much better, amiright?
In my next post I’ll talk about how I weaned myself off of caffeine and what I do to allow it not to become an issue now. It’s pretty cool that I can have caffeine when I want, but it doesn’t give me a horrible headache to go without it.
First a funny backstory/side note.
I used to drink my coffee with cream and sugar. I got rid of the sugar, and eventually decided to go without cream or milk too. Those first few cups of black coffee reminded me of the smell of a skunk. But I got over it and now I only want it black. Why, exactly, did I do this? I’ll tell you: to make my coffee more low-maintenance. Because I love being as low-maintenance as I can be.
Which makes the following section really, really funny.
So seriously. How do you make it so that it actually tastes good? Is it even possible?
Yes!
(disclaimer: the links are to my Amazon affiliate account. I may get a small percentage if you order anything on Amazon when following the links that, uh, follow).
First off: french press. If you’ve never used one, it’s the same basic principle as making loose tea. You pour the grounds in the press, pour hot water over the grounds, wait, and then squeeze it down. Pour out the coffee, leave the grounds in the bottom.
For whatever reason, french press coffee is much richer than from a coffee maker no matter how good that model is (and I do love my coffee maker)
So pretending you’re convinced to try a french press now, what about the beans itself?
You have two options. You can either buy coarse-ground coffee (since you need the same coarseness for cold brew, you can add that to the search terms), which is very hard to find for decaf. OR you can buy whole beans and grind it yourself.
That’s what I ended up doing, because it was that hard to find coarse ground coffee. The grinder I linked to works great after multiple uses a day for 1 1/2 years, so I highly recommend it.
Then it’s a matter of finding beans with some bite.
Depending on how strong you like your coffee, this could be quite a challenge. I like french roast or other similarly dark roasts. That really makes decaf feel like…well, like Pentatonix without a guy singing bass. Still decent, but missing depth.
Reading up on ways decaf is made taught me that Swiss Filtered was a much healthier, much more flavorful form of decaf. So we started trying different brands.
My favorite: Kicking Horse. We get it in two-pound bags with our subscribe and save order.
There’s a first runner up: Don Pablo. It’s about half the price. Not as good, but for the amount of coffee we drink, we wanted to try it.
Our plan for this month is to actually combine the two and see how that tastes. I’ll let you know what we decide if you’re curious!
Tomorrow I’ll write about how (and why) I weaned us off of caffeine, but I knew hearing about good alternatives was going to be the right place to start.
So what do you think? Would you consider going to decaf if you knew it still tasted good? I’d love to hear your thoughts! charla@charmboxstudios.com
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