Decaf didn’t used to be worth talking about. That’s changed.
For decades, decaf coffee sat quietly on the edge of café menus – treated as a compromise rather than a genuine choice. It was often over-roasted, poorly sourced, and stripped of much of what made specialty coffee exciting in the first place. If you ordered decaf, you were expected to accept less flavour, less complexity, and less care.
But coffee has changed. As specialty coffee evolved, so did expectations around quality, transparency, and experience – including what people want from decaf. Better processing methods, improved sourcing practices, and a deeper understanding of flavour preservation have transformed decaf from an afterthought into something worth paying attention to.
Today, some of the world’s best producers and roasters are approaching decaffeination with the same level of precision and intention as any other coffee.
The story of decaf is no longer just about removing caffeine. It’s about how the industry learned – slowly, and often imperfectly – to preserve everything else that matters.
The Birth of Decaf
The first commercially decaffeinated coffee arrived in 1906. A German merchant named Ludwig Roselius noticed that a shipment of beans, soaked in seawater during transit, had lost most of its caffeine. He patented the process and began selling decaf under the name ‘Kaffee HAG’ in Europe and ‘Sanka’ in the United States.
There was just one problem: the solvent he used was benzene – a compound we now know to be a carcinogen. The coffee it produced was flat, lifeless, and faintly chemical in taste. For people who needed to avoid caffeine for medical reasons, it was the only option available.
But it was nobody’s idea of a good cup of coffee.
That early association, that decaf was a reluctant compromise, produced by industrial means, at the cost of flavour, has followed the category ever since.
A Century of Getting It Wrong (and Then Right)
The decades that followed brought a succession of new methods, each attempting to solve the same fundamental challenge: caffeine and flavour compounds are both soluble. Remove one and you risk stripping the other.
The Swiss Water Process, commercialised in the 1980s, removed solvents entirely – using only water and activated charcoal. A milestone in safety, but critics argued it left coffees flat and hollow. Supercritical CO2 decaffeination came closer to preserving flavour integrity, but required equipment so expensive and complex it remained out of reach for most of the industry.
For most of the twentieth century, decaf remained what most people assumed it to be: the lesser option. Then came the sugarcane process – and with it, a genuine shift in what decaf could be.
Mountain Spring Water and Sugarcane: A Better Way
ONA Coffee’s decaf blend, Unwind, is naturally decaffeinated in Colombia using mountain spring water and naturally derived ethyl acetate from sugarcane. This combination – the Water-Natural Ethyl Acetate method – is today considered one of the most flavour-preserving approaches available, and it’s easy to understand why once you know how it works.
Ethyl acetate is not a foreign compound. It is already naturally present in coffee, in fruits, and in vegetables – a ripe banana contains roughly twenty times more of it than a green coffee bean processed this way. The spring water gently opens the bean’s cellular structure; the ethyl acetate selectively bonds with the caffeine and draws it out. No excessive heat, no aggressive pressure.
The process is repeated until at least 97% of the caffeine has been removed, with no more than 0.1% remaining. Once roasted beyond 70°C, any residual traces evaporate completely.
What’s left is the structure of the bean – intact, and with it, the flavour.
Quality First, Then Decaffeination
No process can manufacture quality that wasn’t there to begin with. ONA sources Unwind through Project Origin, whose relationships across Colombia’s Huila, Cauca, and Nariño regions run deep.
Coffees are selected only if they cup between 84 and 85 points – placing them firmly in the specialty tier before decaffeination even begins. Grown at altitude by small producers, carefully washed and dried over five to ten days, these are beans worth preserving.
Unwind delivers the sweetness, depth, and comfort of a well-made coffee – with notes of rich chocolate and caramel, bright citrus peel, and a smooth, balanced finish. Enjoyed black or with milk, any time of day.
That’s the point. Unwind isn’t designed to remind you it’s decaf. The ritual, the flavour, the warmth: it’s all still there.
So the next time someone tells you they’d rather not have a coffee this late in the day – offer them an Unwind. Let the coffee do the talking.