Having recently bought myself a coffee grinder, the hunt was on for the rather elusive product that should be available but seemingly isn’t – decaffeinated coffee beans. My usual supermarket (Tesco) had a whole array of decaf ground coffee, but not actually any beans – and it turns out the only supermarket I can find that sells decaffeinated coffee beans turns out to be Waitrose, and my nearest branch is slightly over 10 miles away. However, next time I passed it, I popped in and bought a few packets to see what it’s like, having bought some ‘normal’ Tesco coffee beans to compare it with of roughly the same strength.

The decaf coffee is marked as ‘3’, which is a medium strength coffee. With the Tesco beans, I thought that 40g of ground coffee per litre of water was about right, but when I tried a similar amount of the decaf, I thought it came out a bit weak. So this morning I upped the “dosage “to 55g/litre, which is the recommendation on the SCAA web site (and being an American web site should be a suitably strong dosage).  I found 55g/litre to be a bit too strong with the Tesco beans, but with the Waitrose beans it tasted just right.  A very nice tasting coffee with no bitterness and tasted like a high quality cup of coffee, which doesn’t taste all that “decaf” if you make it strong enough.  And with all the benefits of being able to sleep at night, too.

Right, where’s my mug … ?