Photo Courtesy of: Dekaf Coffee
Byline: Georgette Virgo
A good decaf rarely tells you how much work went into it. It arrives as a brewed cup, balanced or not, sweet or flat, with little sign of the choices that shaped it long before the kettle was on.
Dekáf Coffee Roasters has built its business around those choices, focusing on decaf and low-caf coffee with the view that less caffeine should not mean less character. Founded in 2025 by Anil Mezini and Khanh Nguyen after years in specialty coffee, the company set out to treat lower-caffeine coffee with the same discipline usually reserved for more celebrated parts of the menu. The premise is simple enough on paper. In practice, it asks for attention at nearly every step.
Altered Beans
Decaf does not arrive at the roaster untouched. By the time it gets there, the bean has already changed, and that affects how it responds to heat. At Dekáf, Swiss Water® Processed coffees define the lineup, so that reality shapes the work from the very beginning.
That is where the margin for error narrows. Too much heat can strip away sweetness and blur the coffee’s character. Treat every decaf the same, and the result can feel flatter than the coffee ever needed to be.
Decaf is not simply regular coffee with caffeine taken out. It asks for a different approach from the start. The job is not just to make it drinkable, but to preserve enough flavor, balance and structure for the coffee to still feel complete in the cup.
Adjustment Work
This is where Dekáf’s low-caf spectrum becomes something more concrete. The company runs separate workflows for different caffeine levels, sample-roasting decaf on an Ikawa Pro100 and handling decaf production on a Coffee-Tech Ghibli R15, while caffeinated beans used in low-caf blends are roasted on a separate Loring S35. Once caffeine level becomes part of the product itself, the work behind it has to be more exact as well.
That shows up in small details most drinkers never think about. Beans and grounds can linger in hoppers, roasters and cooling trays, which makes it harder to handle true decaf and carefully measured low-caf coffee on shared systems. A lower-caffeine lineup only holds up if those distinctions are managed during production, not added later as marketing language.
The same care carries into roast development. Each coffee in the lineup gets its own roast profile instead of being treated like a generic decaf. That work may stay in the background, but it sits at the center of Dekáf’s low-caf approach. Caffeine level may define part of the offering, but it is not meant to flatten everything else that makes a coffee distinct.
In the Cup
All of that work only matters if you can taste it in the cup. A well-roasted decaf should still carry sweetness, balance and character, not just be easy to drink. That is what makes the effort matter.
That is what sits behind Dekáf’s decaffeinated spectrum. It is not the result of one big move, but of many careful choices made along the way, each one shaping the final cup. What reaches the drinker may feel simple. What gives it depth is how much care has been built into it.
