Decaf coffee is for coffee lovers. And Olympia Coffee's Decaf Asterisk is the decaf of coffee lovers’ dreams.
Hold on, you might be thinking. Don’t coffee lovers go all doe-eyed for super-rare reserve lots and 100-hour anaerobic honey-processed beans from the highest-altitude coffee-growing hinterlands? Sure, some do, yes. But, most of all, coffee lovers love to drink coffee— not because it’s rare, but because it’s delicious.
So when the day wears on and you want that perfect cup of warm and comforting delight… Decaf Asterisk wins the day. It’s been a customer favorite for years running, and with its smooth and sweet flavors of milk chocolate, caramel, and marshmallow, it’s not hard to see (or taste) why.
How much do we love Decaf Asterisk?
We here at Olympia Coffee are obsessed with our decaf. So much so that we made a whole video gushing about the sugar cane decaffeination process and what makes this coffee so special.
Great decaf begins at the source
When it comes to making great coffee, period, it all starts with sourcing great beans. Making a fantastic decaf coffee? No exception.
But when searching for the right beans to make our Decaf Asterisk, we ran into a bit of a conundrum. A single batch of decaf requires a baseline number of bags of green coffee (66, if you care to know)— and, being a small roaster, we simply weren’t going through that much decaf. Still, we kept growing. We kept investing in building long-term relationships with our trusted coffee producers. And we kept pursuing our Fair For All mission, determined to have every bean we sourced meet our standards for quality coffee and quality of life.
Then, finally, an option crystallized: with our partners with the San Sebastian Project in Colombia. One of our longest-standing and most valued relationships, this partnership had already been providing us with a steady stream of coffee. By adding to our orders for the year, we got to increasingly support a producer we loved to work with— and get incredible beans to make the Decaf Asterisk we all know and enjoy today.
Sugar cane decaffeination? Sounds pretty sweet.
Oh, it is. Though a lot of decaf coffee gets processed in Germany or Canada, the Colombian beans we use make their decaffeination pit stop before ever leaving Colombia. Our beans go through La Serrania, a Colombian decaf plant, where locally-grown Colombian sugar cane is fermented and naturally converted to ethyl acetate, which is then used to draw the caffeine out of the coffee beans. (Though, if you want to hear more on that, you should really watch our co-founder Sam’s video above. He reeeaaally digs this stuff.)
And since the beans we source from San Sebastian already boast such delectably sugary and caramelly notes, this sugar cane process complements them stunningly well. The result? A cup-ful of flavor—milk chocolate, caramel, and marshmallow— without the caffeine buzz.
I'm in. Brew recs?
Remember from the video how Sam really loves this coffee in a Chemex? Well, he was kind enough to write up his very own brew guide for Decaf Asterisk for Chemex. (Aw, thanks, Sam!)
1. Grind 44 grams of Decaf Asterisk on fairly coarse drip grind (around 20-22 on a Baratza Encore)
2. Pour 700 grams of 205°F filtered water over coffee in 3 pours:
- Start timer at 0:00 pour 100 grams (bloom) saturating the coffee
- At 0:45 pour 300 grams of water spiraling out from center
- At 2:00 pour 300 grams of water spiraling out from center
3. Coffee should finish brewing around 5-6 minutes. Enjoy and share with others!
So next time your coffee cup looks a little sad and empty, but it’s past your ideal caffeination window, reach for a bag of Decaf Asterisk. Because we see you, coffee lover— and this coffee loves you back.
