Bittersweet cocoa, milk chocolate & a lingering caramel sweetness
This is the third of our 50/50 half caffeine blends, and I'm very excited about this one, as it's very close to our best-seller (and my favourite coffee of all time), Chocolate Brownie Blend.
If you like to drink coffee a bit later in the day without worrying about overdoing the caffeine, decaf is one way to go, of course, and we have some amazing Decafs now. But we thought it would also be a great idea to work on half caffeine blends.
This is a blend of our Choc & Nut Colombia and Milk Chocolate & Coconut Decaf Brazil, and the result is even better than I could have imagined. It's like chocolate fudge cake in a cup. Try it, you'll see what I mean!
Coffee Tasting Tips
- Extraction matters, for freshly roasted coffee. See my brew guides.
- Let your coffee cool for 2-3 minutes; the more sensitive taste buds that detect more subtle notes can be desensitised by higher temperatures.
- Alter the strength, for manual brewing methods such as cafetiere, Aeropress or filter, try increasing the amount of coffee to water if the flavour isn't as intense as expected.
How it Tastes
With this blend, I wanted a half caffeine blend that works great for classic, chocolatey & rich espresso. The last 50/50 we released, Apple Pie & Custard Half Caffeine, is more "third wave" in taste profile, with a fruity acidity that some people will love, but not a big classic crowd pleaser, such as our Chocolate Brownie Blend.
The first time I tasted this half-caffeine blend, I wrote "Chocolate Brownie" in my notes, and I was really excited to discover that this is very close in taste profile to our best-selling coffee, and the coffee I'm usually drinking.
As I continued to taste it as various drinks (including flat white, of course) I was increasingly reminded of chocolate fudge, with bittersweet notes of cocoa balanced by a caramel sweetness, so the obvious name for this half caffeine was Chocolate Fudge Cake.
So if you're looking for something like Chocolate Brownie Blend, but with less caffeine, this is the one!
By the way, we're sometimes asked if our coffee contains flavourings, and I can completely understand this question due to the way we name our coffees, but I can assure you our coffee is nothing but freshly roasted coffee beans.
Minas Gerais & Finca La Laguna Reserva, Colombia
The full-caffeine beans in this half-caffeine 50/50 blend are produced by a very small group of family coffee farmers in Finca La Laguna Reserva, in the Cauca region of Colombia.
The decaf beans are farmed by smallholder coffee farmers in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil, and the beans are decaffeinated using the MC process.
