I feel like such an old person asking this question, but I feel like a lot of the medium roast third wave coffees I love have too high of a caffeine content for me. Anyone have a favorite bean that they brew that has a great taste but lower kick?
Posted May 6, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC
At the last exhibition I was at there were people touting the varietal Laurina which has lower caffeine content.
But that's probably not too helpful.
Is it the total content in the cup? Or is it the concentration? You can get a more diluted drink, with more milk to offset. Or you can just drink a smaller size
From the way you phrased it, it seems to me that you want caffeine, but not as much as you're getting. Here are a few suggestions:
Laurina beans have 30%-50% of the caffeine content that most other beans have, but they're expensive and hard to come by.
Make a blend of caffeinated beans and decaffeinated beans.
Make coffee differently. Drip/immersion methods have very high caffeine levels compared to espresso based drinks. Having a double shot Americano instead of a 12oz pour-over, for example, would be a significant caffeine reduction with the same amount of starting coffee (~20g).
Drink less coffee or pace your drinking.
Have you tried decaf?
If you improve extraction you can get more drinkable volume of the same strength (and better taste) out of the same amount of dry coffee. But, as caffeine is extremely quickly all dissolved in virtually all brewing, not significantly more caffeine.
Altitude defines caffeine. The higher the altitude the bean was grown power the amount of caffeine it would contain.
Also, the brewing method Quicker the brew lesser the caffeine.
Cold Brew will have the highest While V60 will have a very low amount.
Of course pressure plays a big role too like in espresso but I think you get the point.
Roast has very little impact on the caffeine on a bean per bean level. The main difference would be arabica vs robusta or water to coffee ratio.
I’m a fan of Ethiopian Natural coffees it a medium light roast that doesn’t give me to much of a caffeine kick. I havnt had it lab tested for caffeine content. Now our high caffeine content coffee which combines Tanzania and Indiana robusta has a big kick and is being lab tested this is also a medium/ medium light roast
To add onto this, 1oz of dark roasted coffee will actually have more caffeine then 1oz of light roasted coffee. This doesn't have anything to do with the caffeine content per bean (and dark roast per bean does have a very very slight amount less caffeine), but rather the fact that light roast Coffees weigh less, and this means that 1oz of coffee has more beans and therefore more caffeine.
It flips when you go by volume though as dark roasted coffee expands more and therefore fewer beans fill up a larger volume.
My understanding is that dark roasted beans weigh less than light roast, due mainly to losing more of their water content.
That's correct. That's why 1oz of dark roast has more caffeine then light. There will be a higher # of beans in 1oz dark vs light due to the lack of water weight.
But just because there's more beans doesn't mean there's more coffee. The beans decrease in density, so one ounce is more beans with less dense coffee but still one ounce. Unless roasting removes some caffeine, roast shouldn't change it since the amount of caffeine relative to the bean mass doesn't change between roasts.
I see how this would make a difference in coffee measured by volume, but a gram of coffee is a gram of coffee.
This is correct but the amount caffeine difference is negligible, unless your hyper sensitive to caffeine which OP could be. I would venture a guess he had some sort of blend that had a robusta bean. As oppose to single origin.