Last year, former world barista champion Pete Licata was suffering from full-blown caffeine addiction.
“I found myself getting really stressed, not really sleeping. I was feeling pretty awful overall,” he tells Broadsheet. “Coffee was this thing I needed, but it wasn’t helping me.”
The doctor’s advice was about as predictable as a champion barista getting hooked on caffeine: just cut back on the stuff. As head of coffee at Melbourne’s Nomad Coffee Group, Pete started thinking about ways he could reduce his consumption without going cold turkey altogether. The answer? Blend decaffeinated coffee beans with caffeinated ones.
“I’ve wanted to take a nap at 1.30pm every day for the last 10 years. But a 67 per cent blend of caffeinated beans and 33 per cent decaf completely got rid of my afternoon caffeine crashes.”
Those experiments proved so successful, he and wife Maria Licata, also a competing barista, started working on a new functional coffee brand. Caffeine Control Coffee has the goal of helping people moderate – rather than cut out – their daily coffee consumption.
“If you go to a cafe where they make traditional Italian espresso and use seven grams of coffee for your shot, the caffeine in that shot is going to be a lot different to a specialty cafe using 22 grams,” says Pete. “There are some massive inconsistencies out there. We want to make something real that people can count on.”
He says Caffeine Control’s range works like a “reduction plan”. The first stop is Full Speed, a fully caffeinated blend designed to introduce drinkers to the brand’s roasting style. Next are two low caffeine blends, Slow Burn and Low Impact, followed by a fully decaffeinated single origin coffee, Smooth Sailing. Made to the recommended recipe, drinkers can expect a consistent level of caffeine in every brew.
Aussie roasters, including Melbourne’s Everyday Coffee and Sydney’s Little Marionette, have dabbled with “half caf” blends, but Caffeine Control is arguably the first in Australia to offer a spectrum like this. And though the “why” of it still exists for a lot of people, decaf is no longer the pariah it once was.
That’s because modern decaffeination processes no longer rely on the use of harsh solvents such as methylene chloride to strip green coffee beans of their caffeine content and, invariably, a lot of their flavour. If the resulting brew is one that tastes flat, dull and (at worst) chemically treated, why go to the trouble of sourcing high quality beans in the first place?
Modern decafs aren’t just becoming more sophisticated – they’re winning awards. In last year’s US Coffee Championships, barista Weihong Zhang took first place in the Brewers Cup category with a Colombian typica coffee decaffeinated with ethyl acetate, a compound naturally found in banana and sugarcane, and a more natural and flavour-preserving way to decaf.
Pete uses a Colombian bean processed by Diego Lopez at Finca San Francisco in the same way. For Caffeine Control’s two low-caffeine options, he blends it with an El Salvador arabica bean. To achieve an even roast, they’re roasted separately at Criteria Coffee in Port Melbourne before they’re blended together on-site.
The Licatas plan to expand the range of blends as well as feature single origin coffees that are naturally lower in caffeine. One of those will meet drinkers no matter where they’re at.
“Ritual is the word I specifically use. If I want coffee in the afternoon, I don't want tea. I don't want a milkshake. Nothing else fills that desire,” says Pete.
Caffeine Control is shipping worldwide, with free shipping on subscriptions and four-packs.
