You’d love to kick the caffeine habit. You know it’s coffee that keeps you tossing at night and you figure it’s also to blame for that “wired” feeling that makes it seem like your nerves are coming out your elbows.
But give up coffee? You love the smell of it. You need the comfort and sustenance that comes with the mug with the brown ring around its collar.
The obvious answer is decaf, right?
Not so fast.
Switching to decaffeinated coffee can be a minefield for the unprepared, experts warn. And before you can start making a satisfying cup of decaf you must get through the booby traps connected to weaning yourself from caffeine.
Consider the following scenario:
It’s 3 p.m. on a lazy Saturday. You’ve slept late, puttered around the house and repotted the dracaena. A friend calls, reminding you of a 3:15 appointment to look at carpet. You realize there’s no longer time to eat; you have to rush to make it downtown.
In the car now, you become aware your head feels as if it’s in a vise. You’re not sure how long you’ve had this headache, but it’s clearly getting worse.
By the time you meet your friend, your only conscious thought is you’re dying for a cup of coffee.
A coincidence? Not by a long shot. You’re probably suffering from inadvertent caffeine withdrawal. Headaches may occur only on weekends because you always have a cup of coffee at your desk on workdays, scientists say.
Withdrawal
A Johns Hopkins University study released last fall reports that even people who consume as little as one cup of coffee a day experience debilitating symptoms-including headaches, drowsiness, fatigue and feelings of depression-when they miss their daily fix. The study helps explain why some people get weekend headaches and why some patients suffer headaches after surgery.
Dr. Roland Griffiths, one of the authors of the study, even suggests that doctors consider giving caffeine supplements to coffee drinkers who can’t eat or drink before surgery.
Research has failed to establish a link between moderate caffeine consumption and heart disease or cancer, so the caffeine withdrawal may be the most serious side effect of coffee drinking, the Hopkins research suggests. (“Moderate” is usually defined as no more than three six-ounce cups of coffee a day, or their equivalent.)
Caffeine usually is described as a central nervous system stimulant, but technically, it-and similar compounds-retard those enzymes that control the amount of adrenalin your body uses, says Stanley Segall, professor of nutrition science at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Thus when caffeine is used, the adrenalin and other hormones flow uninhibited and your muscles, heart and other organs are stimulated indirectly, he says.
Subjectively, the overall effect of caffeine has been described as a lift, a feeling of being wide awake and able to focus on mental and manual tasks.
To figure out your total caffeine consumption, remember that a six-ounce cup of coffee has 80 to 150 milligrams of caffeine (but keep in mind that a typical coffee mug contains 10 ounces). A six-ounce cup of tea averages 40 mg of caffeine (strong tea can have much more), and a 12-ounce can of cola has about 45 mg. (Chocolate also contains some caffeine.)
Nevertheless, many doctors recommend people give up caffeine if they suffer:
– ulcers or other gastrointestinal trouble;
– arrhythmia or tachycardia (an irregular or rapid heart beat), which might be perceived as palpitations or dizziness;
– insomnia (trouble falling asleep or staying asleep);
– premenstrual syndrome;
– high blood pressure (there’s no evidence caffeine causes sustained hypertension, but it may cause undesirable short-term elevation);
– fibrocystic disease (many patients report that giving up caffeine alleviates the discomfort of fibrocystic breasts, although it doesn’t reverse the condition).
Other people may choose to give up caffeine without benefit of counsel just because they don’t want to be dependent on any substance or because it keeps them up at night or makes them feel jittery during the day.
Dr. Howard Cohen, a cardiologist at Illinois Masonic Medical Center, says the only worrisome health effects of caffeine that have been established clearly are that it can disturb sleep and can cause rapid abnormal heart rhythms in those who are susceptible-but probably not in those with normal hearts. And it stimulates the stomach to produce acid, so those prone to ulcers or esophageal reflux (a condition stemming from a faulty valve between the esophagus and the stomach) should lay off.
Muddy risks
Numerous comprehensive reviews of research have found no long-term negative effects of moderate caffeine consumption. “It’s not clear caffeine is a risk factor for cancer or any other kind of heart disease (other than tachycardia),” Cohen said.
It’s equally unclear that decaffeinated coffee is a risk factor for cancer in humans, although some laboratory animals developed tumors when fed large doses.
Decaf also does not appear to disturb sleep (even though it contains a small amount of caffeine) or to increase the incidence of rapid heart rhythm. But it probably should not be used by patients with gastrointestinal problems because it may increase gastric acid secretions, just as caffeinated coffee does.
Cohen is a recent convert to decaf. He says he gave up coffee because it was upsetting his stomach and disturbing his sleep. About 24 hours after his last cup of coffee, he said, “I got a terrible headache that lasted about a day and a half.” Three weeks after he kicked the habit, he said he was still feeling a little tired, especially in the late afternoons.
Dr. Sheldon Miller, chairman of psychiatry at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, agrees that swearing off caffeine can be difficult. Referring to a friend who kicked his 15-cup-a-day habit cold turkey, Miller said he was “very hard to be around” for about a month. His friend reported a raging headache that lasted most of a week, followed by lethargy and unwellness that lasted several more weeks. “He was not a happy camper,” Miller recalled.
How to kick the habit
While some experts object to including caffeine in the list of addictive substances, all agree that it has two of the main characteristics of addictive substances: users develop a tolerance for caffeine, and suffer withdrawal symptoms when they give it up.
While cautioning that “people have very different responses to caffeine, as to all drugs,” Miller says “there’s no question” it’s addictive, and the detoxification process can be more difficult than you might expect.
If you’re a person who gets a headache if you skip your morning coffee, or if you need a cup of strong coffee to treat a headache, you can expect at least some discomfort when you go cold turkey, he says.
One way to lessen the withdrawal symptoms is to decrease your caffeine consumption over several days or weeks, Miller says. When you get down to a single cup a day, you might taper off to half a cup or to a cup of half-caffeinated, half-decaf, before giving it up altogether.
If you decide to make the switch, some converts suggest, it’s a good idea not to go directly to decaf, which contains only 2 to 5 milligrams of caffeine. Miller says it makes sense that when you first give up coffee you might be better off switching to herbal tea or hot cider or something that you don’t expect to taste like coffee. That’s because, no matter how good the decaf tastes, it won’t produce the kick your body has learned to expect. Because you’ll feel let down, he says, you’ll think the coffee tastes flat-whether or not it does.
But Miller puts the emphasis on herbal (or decaffeinated) tea and warns, “You don’t want to replace coffee with regular tea. You don’t want any caffeine while you’re trying to detox.”
Phase 2
Once the effects of caffeine withdrawal have worn off (taking a couple of days to several weeks), you can plunge into Phase 2: the Search for a Good Cup of Decaffeinated Coffee.
The first step is to find the right type of coffee for your palate, a process no different for decaf than for regular coffee.
The type of coffee (robusta or the more expensive arabica), the origin of the beans (Colombian, Ethiopian or Kenyan, for example), the roast (darker or lighter) and the brewing process all are matters of personal choice-although you may find while experimenting with decafs that your taste has changed. For example, if you who preferred milder-tasting Colombian coffee in your former life you might choose a darker, slightly bitter French roast.
There’s an additional element in choosing a decaf: the processing method, which basically is a choice between chemical and non-chemical solvents used to extract the caffeine from the green coffee beans.
Although most coffee experts say that beans decaffeinated with the chemical solvent methylene chloride retain more of their original flavor, many say that the non-chemical processes finally have become competitive in terms of taste. (See related article)
In any case, there are numerous other considerations. While they are the same factors that affect your choice of any coffee, they are perhaps even more important with decaf, which can lose some of its flavor in the processing.
Importance of roasting
The single most important factor, say industry experts, is the amount of elapsed time since the beans were roasted-not ground, but roasted. The finest blend of expensive coffee beans will taste like soap if they’ve been lying around exposed to the air in open bins.
Unless you know that the turnover is very quick and the beans you’re buying were roasted in the past few days, take a pass. Be suspicious of stores that insist their coffee is “fresh” but can’t tell you when the beans were roasted.
The good news for those in search of the Good Cup of Coffee is that you don’t have to grind your own. The bad news is that, even if you do, you can’t keep beans for long: they grow stale and the taste deteriorates.
About 95 percent of the specialty coffee roasters do not protect their beans from air, wrote Paul Katzeff, roastmaster and CEO of Thanksgiving Coffee Co., Ft. Bragg, Calif., in the September-October (1992) newsletter of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, and it generally takes five to seven days for coffee to reach the retailer from the roaster. Because coffee beans become partially stale within 10 days of roasting, Katzeff says, they are often well on the way to staleness by the time the consumer brings them home.
Some shops-including the Home Economist, which has six branches in the western and northern suburbs-will tell you when freshly roasted beans are expected from the roaster. The Skokie branch store generally gets a given type of bean once in two weeks, so you could be buying two-week-old coffee if you pick up the Colombian coffee the day before a fresh batch arrives. On the other hand, you can get excellent decaffeinated Italian roast (or whatever) if you pick it up on the day it arrives. (A company spokesman swears it comes to the store the next day after roasting.)
If you buy at the supermarket, head for the prepacked coffees. You’re often better off with a commercial coffee that’s vacuum-packed immediately after roasting, either in a can or in a foil bag with an airtight seal. (They now have little valves that allow air to escape from the bag but none to get in.)
Laura Moix, a spokeswoman for Starbucks, says that company’s coffees all are roasted in Seattle and packed within two hours in vacuum packs with one-way valves for shipment to stores around the country. Once the vacuum pack has been opened in the store the coffee must be sold within seven days, Moix says. Anything remaining on the eighth day is donated to charity.
Bean storage
How you store coffee, and how long, depends on who you ask. Most experts agree you should store them in an airtight container about the same size as the volume of coffee you’re storing: You don’t want 8 ounces of coffee in a pint container, because you’ll have a lot of air in there with the beans. This is true whether the beans are whole or ground, and whether you store them in the refrigerator or freezer. And no, you can’t store coffee in the freezer indefinitely, even if the beans haven’t been ground.
Steve Ruiz, buyer for Gavina coffee, a coffee wholesaler in Los Angeles, says ground coffee can be refrigerated in an airtight container for a month; whole beans can be kept a little longer. But Michael Ryan, wholesale manager for the Coffee & Tea Exchange in Chicago, advises keeping it in the freezer because there’s too much moisture in the fridge. He agrees that coffee can be stored up to a month in an airtight container.
However, Dub Hay, coffee taster and buyer for the Nestle Beverage Co., says you can keep coffee no more than two to three weeks after it’s been roasted, no matter how you store it. Whole beans get stale, too, albeit a little more slowly than ground coffee, and keeping them in the freezer retards the process only marginally, so don’t buy more coffee than you can use in two to three weeks.
Katzeff, who recommends refrigerating coffee beans in moisture-proof glass containers, also advises against mixing leftovers from your last batch with the fresh coffee you just bought.
After making sure your coffee is fresh, the most important consideration is water. If your water tastes like chlorine, so will your coffee. Some people prefer bottled water. If you do use tap water, always get it from the cold faucet; the hot water has more minerals.
The brewing method is the last choice you have to make, and here there are numerous options, each with its own zealots. Some purists insist on a method in which the water goes through the grounds only once (as in a paper filter cone). But others prefer plunger pots, in which the coffee sits in the water for several minutes.
Michael Ryan of the Coffee & Tea Exchange in Chicago says, “It’s really up to the individual palate,” but he conceded that the Exchange recommends a cone brewing system. “It seems to produce a cleaner flavor than a flat-bottomed system,” he said.
If you maintain quality and freshness in your choice of beans, you should be able to make a Good Cup of Coffee with decaf that appoximates, if not matches, the caffeinated variety.
The only thing you’ll be missing is the buzz.
Tasting Swiss Water process decaf Colombian coffees
Coffee Comments Price/lb.
Brewster’s Coffee Sweet, pleasing, toasty aroma, winey nose, $8.95
Store No. 1, fruity, more full-bodied than others, low-acid,
161 N. Clark St. mellow, weak, little flavor
Cafe Coffee, Not much aroma, fruity, low acidity, light- $6.99
5211 S. Harper Ave. and bodied, well-balanced, nice, good snap
3002 N. Sheffield Ave.
Coffee Chicago, Toasted nut aroma, burnt aroma, medium $8.45
2922 N. Clark St. and body, slightly astringent aftertaste, bitter, the
5 other locations++ roast comes through more than the others
Coffee & Tea Exchange, Fragrant aroma, winey aroma, good amount $6.55
3300 N. Broadway and of acidity, typical/medium body, surprising
833 W. Armitage Ave. body and strong aroma
Gloria Jean’s Gourmet Tangy, fruity aroma, its snap fades $7.99
Coffees, 34 Chicago quickly after tasting, medium body, nice initial
area locations flavor that dissipates to a sour
aftertaste, roasty flavor
Hubbard Woods Coffee Interesting tobacco-like aroma, slightly nutty $8.25
Roaster, 81 Glencoe Rd., aroma, medium body, high acidity, good
Glencoe flavor, all around well balanced,
nice aftertaste
Nicholas A. Deep aroma, sour aroma, nice acidity, $5.80
Papanicholas, good body, unpleasant aftertaste,
major supermarkets winey taste
Starbucks Coffee, Slightly winey, tobacco-like aroma, burnt aroma, $9.25
34 Chicago medium acidity, medium-full body, much of the
area locations flavor is roasted out, stronger/better flavor,
mellow flavor, good aftertaste
++methylene chloride process
