By Alex, Founder of Raw Bean Coffee | Updated 10 August 2026
The best decaf coffee in the UK depends more on how you brew it than on which brand shouts loudest. For coffee bags, the BBC Countryfile team put our Definitely Decaf Bean Bags in their test of eight decaf blends and called them the best decaf coffee bags. For ground, beans and pods, look for three things: the decaffeination method named outright, a named origin rather than just the word "decaf", and reviews you can read in full.
Every Raw Bean pick below is decaffeinated with water instead of chemical solvents. Our prices were checked on 10 August 2026.
We sell decaf, so take our word for nothing
Raw Bean is a small independent coffee company from Winchester, we started in 2012 on a market stall, and our coffee is roasted in the UK. We also sell the decaf in this article, which makes it a seller's list. So every pick leans on something you can check without us in the room.
- Awards. Our Definitely Decaf Perfect Pods hold a 2-star Great Taste Award and a Silver Great British Food Award. Neither is decided by anyone on our payroll.
- A third-party group test we had no hand in. Countryfile tested eight decaf blends, using a hand grinder and an Aeropress where required, and it is free to read.
- Published ratings. The Definitely Decaf pages carry a Judge.me score of 4.8 out of 5 from 84 reviews across the range, the one-star reviews included, because we cannot delete those.
And where the best route to a decent decaf has nothing to do with us, that route is in here too, near the bottom.
What is the best decaf coffee in the UK?
There is no single winner, because a bag that suits a campervan is useless in a bean-to-cup machine. Pick the format first, then the coffee. The whole Raw Bean decaf range, laid out flat.
| Format |
Best for |
Caffeine per cup |
Price from |
| Coffee bags, 12g, box of 10 |
Mug and hot water only. Office, holiday let, campsite |
2-15mg |
£5.39 |
| Ground, 200g, Colombian |
Cafetiere, pour-over, filter machine |
2-15mg |
£6.75 |
| Espresso ground, 227g |
Espresso machines, finer grind |
2-15mg |
£7.49 |
| Whole beans, 227g, medium or dark roast |
Grinders and bean-to-cup machines |
2-15mg |
£7.49 |
| Whole beans, 1kg |
Daily drinkers, offices, bean-to-cup |
2-15mg |
£29.99 |
| Nespresso-compatible pods, box of 10 |
Original-line machines, one cup at a time |
2-15mg |
£4.00 |
| Single-origin ground, 200g |
Brazil, Peru, Sumatra, Costa Rica |
2-15mg |
£9.99 |
| Individually wrapped bags, case of 50 |
Hotels, meeting rooms, staff kitchens |
2-15mg |
£33.49 |
Caffeine column is the US Food and Drug Administration's range for any decaf, 2 to 15mg per 8-fluid-ounce cup. Our own figure for Swiss Water decaf is 2 to 7mg, at the bottom of that span, and it is our estimate rather than a regulator's. Raw Bean prices checked 10 August 2026.
Best decaf coffee bags: Definitely Decaf Bean Bags
If you want proper decaf with no kit at all, this is the one, and the recommendation is not ours. Countryfile gave it their best decaf coffee bags slot, writing that the standard pack "was a frontrunner in our test, with plenty of flavour but little to no bitterness".
The number that does the work is 12g. Each pyramid bag holds 12g of speciality-grade Arabica, where a lot of coffee bags use around 7.5g. That gap is the difference between a cup you finish and a cup you tip away. Three minutes in a mug, then out.
The bags are plant-based and go in the food waste bin with the grounds. Which matters at the remote Airbnb with one kettle, in the campervan, at the desk on a Tuesday, and at nine at night when you fancy a coffee and still want to sleep.
£5.39 for ten. Definitely Decaf Bean Bags, or the full decaf coffee bags range. New to the format? How coffee bags work covers the mechanism, and the caffeinated versions live on the coffee bags hub.
Best decaf ground coffee and beans
Our Colombian Definitely Decaffeinated is one coffee in four grinds and grades, so pick by machine, not by flavour notes.
Ground, 200g, £6.75
Single origin from Quindío, Colombia. Smooth creamy body, dark cocoa and walnuts, clean finish. For a cafetiere, pour-over or filter machine. This is the one that started the Great Taste run.
Espresso ground, 227g, £7.49
Same coffee, finer grind. Buy this rather than the 200g if you are pulling shots, because grind size decides extraction and no amount of good intention fixes the wrong one.
Whole beans, 227g, £7.49
Medium roast for balance, dark roast for a blunter hit. Both are the same Colombian beans behind the award-winning ground and pods.
Whole beans, 1kg, £29.99
The office bag, and the bean-to-cup bag. Full range at decaf ground coffee. Choosing between whole bean, ground and roast level is covered properly in our decaf coffee beans buying guide.
Best decaf pods for a Nespresso machine
Our Definitely Decaf Perfect Pods are £4.00 for a box of 10 and hold a 2-star Great Taste Award plus a Silver Great British Food Award. They are 100% aluminium, so empty the grounds, rinse, and they go in your home recycling.
They fit original-line Nespresso-compatible machines, which excludes Vertuo and VertuoPlus. The coffee is ground for extraction rather than speed, so the pod may take a few seconds longer than supermarket ones. More at decaf coffee pods.
Best decaf single origins, if you have had enough of Colombia
Four Swiss Water single origins, £9.99 to £11.99 for 200g, all omni-ground for cafetiere, pour-over or filter.
- Brazilian Oberon, Cerrado. Creamy, malty chocolate, a touch of citrus. £9.99.
- Peruvian Fairtrade Organic, Chanchamayo. Honeycomb, malty, nutty, caramel. £10.99.
- Costa Rican Hacienda Sonora micro-lot, at the base of the Poás volcano. Ripe cherry, caramel sweetness. £10.99.
- Sumatran Fairtrade Organic Mandheling, Lake Toba. Molasses, tropical fruit, spice, cocoa. £11.99.
Our Guatemalan Antigua is out of stock as of 10 August 2026.
What is the best tasting decaffeinated coffee?
The best tasting decaf is one where the decaffeination was gentle and the coffee underneath was worth drinking. Those are two separate things, and most bad decaf fails the second. A cheap robusta stripped with solvents tastes like a cheap robusta stripped with solvents.
Swiss Water's own description is that the process "uses only water, temperature, and time to gently remove caffeine, while preserving all of a coffee's origin characteristics". No esters, no solvents. That is why we buy it, and why we can print an origin and an altitude on the back of a decaf pack.
Is there a decaf coffee that tastes like real coffee?
Yes, and the useful test is whether it wins anything at all. Our decaf holds a Great Taste Award. Our own way of putting that is that it is an award for coffee rather than an award for being good for a decaf, though read the Guild of Fine Food's criteria and judge for yourself. We are not the right people to explain someone else's judging.
The problem was never decaf. It was decaf done cheaply, back when the method took the flavour out along with the caffeine and everyone quietly agreed to call it a compromise. There is a certain sort of drinker who will tell you decaf is a waste of a good bean, usually while weighing beans to a tenth of a gram at ten at night and then wondering why sleep is difficult. Good luck to them. The rest of us want a second cup after dinner that tastes of something, and modern water-process decaf manages it. In our experience, served alongside the caffeinated version without comment, most people do not remark on it.
Which decaf coffee does not use chemicals in the UK?
Look for the Swiss Water Process on the pack, or the CO2 process. Both remove caffeine without chemical solvents. Swiss Water states its process is chemical-free "because we don't use esters or solvents", and that it decaffeinates to 99.9% caffeine-free.
If a pack says only "decaffeinated" with no method named, the label will not tell you which route was used. Every coffee in our Swiss Water decaf collection names it, with the four stages explained in our Swiss Water Process guide and on the Swiss Water decaf page.
Where else to look
A roundup where the seller wins every category is not a roundup. So here are the routes that do not involve us.
Supermarket own-label
Countryfile picked Tesco Finest Colombian Decaffeinated as its best supermarket-brand decaf, listing it at £3.90 when that review was written, and noting that "most supermarkets now offer good-quality decaf coffee". They called it "a great, reasonably priced all-rounder". If the weekly shop is the whole point, that is a sound answer and cheaper than ours. Check the current shelf price, because we have not verified theirs.
Other UK roasters worth a look
Pact took Countryfile's best ethically-sourced decaf slot, the team finding its blend "lighter and fruitier than some of the other coffees we tried, with a chocolatey taste". Grind and Union were in the same test. All three make decaf worth drinking, and we would rather you drank good decaf than none.
Check the method rather than assuming, because these three do not all do it the same way. Pact describe their process as "the sugarcane ethyl acetate method", and Grind's explainer of the sugar cane process says "this is how Grind decaffeinates our coffee beans". Union is the exception of the three: "we only use water and carbon dioxide in our decaffeination process". Ethyl acetate is an ester, so if what you want is no solvent of any kind, that narrows it to water and CO2. Neither route is a bad way to make decaf, and the flavour argument is about the roaster rather than the chemistry.
Instant decaf
Countryfile's overall Editor's Choice was Nescafé Azera Americano Decaff, which they said "tastes just as delicious as its fully caffeinated counterpart". We do not make instant and never will. If you want a cup in eleven seconds, that is the category, and Countryfile rated it above everything else they tried, us included.
Where we think we win is the combination: a water-only process, a named origin, a Great Taste Award, and 12g in a coffee bag rather than 7.5g. Where we lose is price per gram against a supermarket own-label. Both are true at once.
How much caffeine is left in a good decaf?
Europe has its own number. The European Food Safety Authority's 2015 caffeine assessment worked on 21mg per litre for decaffeinated coffee, about 4mg in a 200ml cup, a figure it took from ANSES, France's food safety agency. The US Food and Drug Administration puts the spread across decaf products at "2 to 15 milligrams in an 8-fluid-ounce cup", and Harvard's Nutrition Source lands where EFSA does, about 4mg for decaf against about 95mg for a regular 8-ounce brewed coffee. Our own published figure for Swiss Water decaf is 2 to 7mg, at the bottom of the FDA's span, and that one is our estimate rather than a regulator's.
Either way it is a small fraction of a regular cup. What counts as too late is individual, and if caffeine is something you have been told to watch, ask a pharmacist or your GP rather than a coffee roaster. Full numbers in how much caffeine is in a decaf coffee, and the evidence on whether it wrecks your night in decaf coffee and sleep. If the evening cup is the whole reason you are here, Nightcap is the page built for it.
Start with the format, buy one bag, and see whether you can tell. If you can, tell us, because we would genuinely like to know... though if you can only tell at the summit of Snowdon in the rain, we may want a second opinion.
