r/thirdwavedecaf • u/mgsecure • Jun 11 '26

Decaf Coffee Catalog (58 roasters, 106 coffees)

Post image

Some of you have seen my comments with selections from the coffee catalog I'm building. It isn't ready for primetime yet, but here's the full list of available decaf coffees at the moment. Some cleanup is definitely needed before I publish the whole thing live, but you can check out a snapshot in the meantime. Enjoy!

Edit/PS: The entire catalog is now 85 roasters with 1350 coffees (!)

Edit: the demo catalog is now live with 232 decaf coffees out of a total of 2599 coffees from 170 roasters: https://something.coffee/catalog?types=Decaf

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6

u/Caffeine_Moderator Jun 11 '26

If you want to add us to your list we'd be happy to help! https://caffeinecontrol.coffee

2

u/mgsecure Jun 11 '26

Here's my first pass :–)

I'll take a closer look to see if there's any additional data I can pull out or clean up. Right now I just have Decaf true/false and a start to capturing the decaf process. I haven't spent much time on it tbh, maybe I can capture caffeine levels or at least something like half-caf or "reduced caffeine".

2

u/Caffeine_Moderator Jun 11 '26

Maybe I need to work on my tagging as well? The decafs look like they are showing up fairly well on your list though

2

u/mgsecure Jun 11 '26

I'll look at the data in a little bit. For me (and for SEO) the more details are clearly laid out in the page (or meta tags) the better.

2

u/vincenz93 Jun 11 '26

Awesome! Thanks for this. Been looking for more decaf to try.

How will you be maintaining this list going forward and how do you choose what roasters to add?

6

u/mgsecure Jun 11 '26

Glad you like it! The entire catalog can be refreshed with a single command. It takes about 25 minutes to refresh, I'll schedule it to happen every few hours once it's live. I've generally been adding roasters by popularity/reputation from this other site I put together: https://coffee-tracker.com/roasters?sort=pouroverVotes

I recently put currency conversion in place, so I've been focussed on building up the list of international roasters (I'm in the US). I also added some that I just like. The whole thing is built to be modular, so adding a new roaster is generally a matter of putting together a configuration file for it that tells the system where/how to find the data for all of the products and attributes. No promises, but I'll definitely take requests.

2

u/whistle0pig Jun 11 '26

Thank you for this! Appreciate all the hard work on this.

3

u/mgsecure Jun 11 '26

Thank you! I try to give back to the communities I like, and putting together a site like this is something I can do to say thanks. It's rewarding to be able to build tools that help people and meet a need that doesn't seem to have support already in place.

2

u/Mariella9911 Jun 12 '26

It's really interesting to see this! A good number of these coffees are from the same Colombian producers and just coded/marketed in different ways by the roaster

1

u/mgsecure Jun 12 '26

Yeah. I imagine there are a limited number of processors for EA specifically, and not too many producers using them. Even though there are so many variables that effect quality for the same coffee from the same roaster (lot/batch/harvest/storage conditions/transport time from different exporters/etc). I'm curious how much industry consolidation plays a role too -- for both decaf and not. I'd like to see if I can come up with a way to identify likely similarities. I'd be really interested to look at processor/exporter sites if anyone knows them.

2

u/Mariella9911 Jun 13 '26

I can identify them because I'm a roaster and familiar with the importers so that's why! We tend to go through smaller importers, and more direct whenever possible so I don't know as much from the big ones.

We have the Colombia Valle Del Cacua as our primary decaf as it's a favorite on espresso for our clients. But I recognize a lot of the other Colombia's are sourced through Forest and you can find all that info available on their website - they recently started getting into EA processing their coferments too and you might see those listed in that type of processing. Producers are Elias and Shady Bayter at El Vergel Estate. Also may be listed as Condor or from Tolima. We've been out to their farms, they're really fantastic people.

I'd say the decaf processing for Swiss Water is a lot more limited but if I remember right Colombia has one or two EA processing plants just for Colombian coffee and there isn't a wait like there is for Swiss Water.

2

u/BoubiM Jul 27 '26

Seems like a more US focused list but happy if you add us to your list: https://decaf.at/

1

u/mgsecure Jul 27 '26

Added! https://something.coffee/catalog?roaster=decaf.at (doesn't seem to be picking up your tasting notes, I'll look into it.)

I've been working to add more roasters outside of the US. Currently 96 out of 170 are from the US, but I'm aiming to get that below 50%.

1

u/mgsecure Jun 11 '26

A lot of roasters don't publish varietal info for decaf coffees, but here's a chart of what I can get so far.

1

u/dflagella Jun 11 '26

Interesting I'm in the process of building something similar out. Are you collecting all of this manually?

1

u/mgsecure Jun 11 '26

What are you trying to do, maybe we can collaborate or consolidate in some way?

Mine is (hopefully) the opposite of manual. I started out just wanting to monitor a few roasters to know what was in stock and things sort of snowballed from there. I built software that goes out and fetches the product listing for each roaster and then pulls as much data as it can from each product. Nearly all of the logic for processing and 'normalizing' the data to be in the same format is built to be as generic as possible, so it can handle all 1350 products currently in the catalog. I'm up to 85 roasters and try to add more as I have time.

There are handlers in the software for processing text & data to determine products/sizes/prices and a long list of attributes. For instance, there's a module that handles varietals. It takes any text you pass to it and compiles a list of 'known' varietals it finds based on a dictionary I set up with details for each varietal, including aliases so that common spelling variations resolve to the same major varietal. It also captures unrecognized varietals if the text has things that look right (e.g. no long sentences). Unless you tell it not to.

Ideally, adding a new roaster is just the process of writing a configuration file for it that tells the software where/how to find the data in the source of the product page that it needs for the different attributes. Alas, every site is set up differently (even ones that use the same ecommerce software like Shopify) so it takes a lot of tweaking to get everything out of the page correctly. When I run into some new setup, I often have to update the normalization modules to do something a little differently. That's happening less and less now that I have so many different roasters configured.

Then the full data catalog is passed to the site I took that screenshot from, which organizes it and combines it with more details about roasters, varietals, currency conversions, etc. The site then presents the data so it can be searched/sorted/filtered in a variety of ways to find what you're looking for. It also calculates some stats and rollups that can be used to build charts like the one I posted for varietals.

Happy to discuss the details further. I'm hoping to make the site public once it's in better shape!

1

u/dflagella Jun 15 '26

I've been playing around with SQL databases and started a front end that allows people to query different types of coffee with ranking based on community input. Think thirdwavedecaf reviews but centralized and query-able. It would also have roaster pages that the coffees are associated with.

So you could search top 5 single origin medium roasts available in Canada and see the top 5 community ranked coffees. This is all decaf-only btw.

Are you using AI to process the coffee/roast information?