Decaf Water Process.

Water processing is a way to remove caffeine from coffee without using any outside chemicals or solvents. There are two main companies that do this, they are the Swiss Water Process based in Canada (they don’t actually use water from Switzerland) and the Mountain Water Process based in Mexico. They both use very similar processes; they just have different types of caffeine filters for their processes.

The coffee starts out as a green bean that contains a bunch of water soluble flavors and compounds. Water processing starts by soaking the green coffee in water that is carefully temperature and time regulated to remove as much of the soluble material as possible, caffeine being one of those materials. The first batch of beans are then discarded and the dissolved coffee materials are used in a later batch. That first batch of soluble material, called Green Coffee Extract or GCE by the Swiss Water plant, is then run through 4 filters to remove the caffeine from the liquid. 

So now you have a bunch of water that has all of the material from coffee except the caffeine. If you soak a new batch of coffee and discard the water you can reintroduce the GCE which has all the flavors of coffee with none of the caffeine and the beans will soak it back up. The beans are then sent to a dryer to remove the excess water in the coffee bean. So in essence you have all the fun coffee flavor without the punch and  you get to enjoy your favorite bean any time of day without having to worry about the side effects of a sleepless night.

Stoble has chosen to only use water processed coffees because we believe that this process has the smallest effect of the coffee flavor and is in the end a little bit healthier for us to consume because there are no chemical additives.