Swiss Water Decaf

Decaf without the chemicals. Smooth, mild and sweet with good notes of roasted peanut, soft milk chocolate and cookie dough. Medium-bodied with mild acidity and slight burnt sugar sweetness.

Decaf that still tastes like proper coffee. Our Swiss Water Decaf is smooth, mild and sweet, with roasted peanut, soft milk chocolate and cookie dough up front and a little burnt sugar at the finish. It's medium bodied with gentle acidity, so it's just as good in an evening cafetière as it is in a flat white.

We roast it to a medium level to keep that sweetness at the centre of the cup. It holds its own through milk and makes a clean, rounded pour-over, which is more than a lot of decafs can manage.

At a glance

• Origin: Cerrado, Minas Gerais, Brazil
• Varieties: Catuai, Mundo Novo and Bourbon
• Process: natural, then decaffeinated by the Swiss Water Process
• Caffeine: 99.9% caffeine free
• Roast: medium
• Tasting notes: roasted peanut, milk chocolate, cookie dough, burnt sugar

How the Swiss Water Process works

The Swiss Water Process uses water, time and temperature, and no chemical solvents. It takes place in British Columbia, Canada. The green beans are soaked in water that is already saturated with coffee's natural flavour compounds but contains no caffeine. Because that water can't take on any more flavour, only the caffeine moves out of the beans. The caffeine is then filtered out through carbon and the water is used again.

The beans stay in the process until they are 99.9% caffeine free. Some other decaf methods use solvents such as methylene chloride or ethyl acetate, and this one doesn't. If you want the detail, our guide to what Swiss Water decaf is goes through it step by step.

Where the beans come from

The coffee is grown in the Cerrado, a high plateau in Minas Gerais and one of Brazil's best known growing regions. Its long dry season suits natural processing, where the coffee cherries are dried whole with the fruit still around the bean. That's where a good deal of the sweetness in the cup comes from, and it survives the decaf process well.

How to brew it

• Cafetière: 15g of ground coffee to 250ml of water just off the boil. Stir, leave for four minutes, then press slowly.
• Pour-over: 15g of medium-fine coffee to 250ml of water at about 94°C, poured in stages over roughly three minutes.
• Espresso: start at 18g in and about 36g out in 25 to 30 seconds, then adjust the grind to taste.

Our ground option is ground for cafetière. For espresso, a moka pot or an AeroPress, choose whole beans and grind them fresh at home. There's more on getting the best from it in our guide to brewing Swiss Water decaf.

Who it's for

Anyone cutting back on caffeine who doesn't want to give up good coffee. It's the cup for after lunch, after dinner, or for the person in the house who loves coffee but not what it does to their sleep. If it becomes your everyday coffee, Subscribe & Save means you won't run out.