Please Stop What You're Doing And Share Your Feelings On Decaf Coffee

Death before decaf?

Coffee is the best thing about my morning and decaf is the best thing about my afternoon.

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I love coffee's flavor. I like the experience of drinking coffee. I enjoy its aroma, whether it's a steaming cup of Starbucks or a bag of freshly ground beans in my backpack. (Please withhold your Starbucks criticism. I get it.) I consider a used filter with a pile of sodden grounds an air freshener for my trash.

I like coffee so much that I even enjoy decaf.

That's right — I will seek out the version of coffee that has gone through a multistep industrial process that extracts the ingredient it's known for, along with its signature "coffee" flavor, before that flavor is reinjected into the now-decaffeinated beans so that I can enjoy a just-coffeelike-enough version of coffee.

Look, I’ve heard the arguments against decaf — and some are better than others, IMO.

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Here are the big four (but please let me know in the comments if you have another anti-decaf argument that you can substantiate).

1. The only point of coffee is caffeine.

If coffee is merely a caffeine delivery system that you tolerate because you need that sweet, sweet energy, then decaf doesn't make sense to you. Got it. In this case, I respect the fact that you don't drink it. But this doesn't support the argument that no one should drink it.

2.  Decaf doesn't taste as good.

If you're telling me you can taste when coffee has been decaffeinated, please invite me to the independent coffee shop you own because you obviously have spent a chunk of your life developing your coffee palate. If you're not a bona fide coffee connoisseur, but you're saying you can taste the difference, I'm going to need to you prove that with a double-blind taste test.

3. [Strong opinion that decaf is inferior, but you can't articulate why.]

I respect your moxie and your commitment, but ultimately this isn't a defensible position.

4. Decaffeinating coffee is expensive and resource intensive and is therefore wasteful.

This is probably the only valid argument against decaf coffee. But, tbh, I have a feeling it's only deployed by people who have A Thing against decaf and are reverse engineering reasons why. That said, if you can prove that that’s definitely not you, I will reconsider.

So. Decaffeinated coffee: unfairly maligned or actually very fairly and understandably maligned? Let's see who's right.

By "right," I mean has the most people on their side.