I am a coffee roaster. Decaf would have similar anti-oxidant level, but slightly less, than regular as long as the chemical decaffienation process is used, rather than swiss-water. The chemicals are very specific to removing caffiene where the water process removes many of the componants of coffee, including caffiene, organics, flavor, etc. What does ruin the anti-oxidant levels more than anything is time. Coffee should be consumed within 2 weeks of being roasted and it is nearly impossible to find that. Starbucks coffee is already stale by the time it is served, not to mention they burn the anti-oxidants and flaver out of the coffee anyways. Ground coffee oxydizes many times faster than whole bean, so it is better to grind coffee as you brew it. Find a local roastery or better yet, order from this Physicist/coffee roaster in Arizona www.villagecoffee.com Ethiopian coffee would be the way to go, particularly Yirgacheffe. You will get that offee within days of being roasted and their decaf is hard to tell that it isn’t regular. Look at the story page and it will explain a little about the importance of the roasting method used. Another thing about chemical process being superior to water process; people think the chemical process is dangerous but we can only measure a few parts per billion of the chemicals used in a mass spectrometer after the coffee is roasted. The FDA measures parts per million in determining safety. The chemicals burn off at a much lower temp than the 440 deg we roast coffee to. If you have any styrofoam products anywhere in your house, cups in pantry or cooler in your garage, you currently breathe many more times the chemicals than you will ever get drinking coffee. Funny to think of the people who need to pour their ’safer’ water processed coffee into a styrofoam cup to drink. Another area of misunderstanding is organic coffee. Organic certification is so expensive for a third world farmer that they don’t spend the money on it, even though they generally don’t use chemical fertilizers. Coffee should be shade grown under a canopy of trees. Most organic farms cut down the rain forest and grow in large corporate farms in direct sunlight. This allows them to get an extra harvest and sell a sub-standard product at a much higher price. Select coffee that is shade grown and fair market. The small farms are non-certified organically grown. I do buy organic when the products are grown here, but how many FDA agents do you figure are roaming around Ethiopia, Costa Rica and the like, making sure the farms are following their strict organic criteria?
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