Weighing the pros and cons of drinking decaf coffee

By Kristina Charania
Photos by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier

We all know that judging glance you dole out when the next person in line orders a decaf beverage. Any returning university student will tell you that coffee isn’t coffee without caffeine. And, while judging is (usually) never nice, many decaf drinkers are unaware of the long, controversial history backing the decaffeination process.
There are several ways to decaffeinate a coffee bean, but two popular methods, the direct and indirect methods of decaffeination, have been under fire for nearly 30 years for posing potential hazards to consumers. Both use a chemical solvent like dichloromethane to extract caffeine from beans without losing their flavour or aroma.
If you think the simplicity of these methods sounds too good to be true, you’d be correct. An early study in 1981 fed dichloromethane to several mice through a stomach tube — the tumors resulting from ingestion easily proved that dichloromethane was carcinogenic for small animals. Eventually, the chemical was recognized as possibly carcinogenic to humans by organizations like the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
But, my friend, let’s be realistic here.
Dichloromethane is undoubtedly the big bad chemical that you think it is, but it doesn’t make decaf coffee a sudden danger to your health. For starters, testing on mice simply isn’t the same as testing on people — developed tumors in mice don’t concretely prove that they will form in humans under similar conditions.
The mice in these cancer studies were also pumped with enough of the chemical to equal millions of cups of coffee for a human being. Any carcinogen circulating the body in extreme concentrations is naturally going to produce cancerous tumors. You’d likely bust your stomach open before you reached a hundred cups of coffee, anyways.
If there is any solvent remaining in decaf beans, it’s likely to evaporate from your beloved beverage in the brewing process. The solvent’s boiling point is approximately 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and coffee is usually brewed between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit — ensuring that the dichloromethane will mostly boil off by the time any coffee reaches your hands. In addition, past studies tested decaf coffee samples and found values ranging up to 4.0 ppm (parts per million — that’s a pretty small unit) in these samples, which falls under the 10.0 ppm maximum level specified by the FDA.
Although the FDA was approached by several groups to ban dichloromethane in all food production, their faith in the chemical’s harmlessness was unwavering. This leads to a final point: while dichloromethane is still used fairly often, the media did a stupendous job in scaring many companies into using other methods. Many companies like Nestle have banned the use of dichloromethane in production as an extra precaution and moved to using ethyl acetate, a compound that occurs naturally in fruit. This means that some of the decaf you consume hasn’t come in contact with any solvents and is safe to drink.
If you find yourself prematurely eyeing today’s coffee roasts with the caffeine-deficient mania you normally reserve for final exam week, do a double-take and indulge in a hearty cup of decaf if desired. If you’re a stickler for chemical-free foods, give herbal coffees a shot or seek out a Tim Hortons decaf coffee — their Swiss Water method uses a carbon filter instead of synthetic substances to remove the caffeine from beans. Consumers and industry professionals consider this method safe, and it originated right here in British Columbia.
Go ahead and take a sip. That 24-ounce decaf double-double beside you is still safe after all.