No Curfews

Why 'Naturally Decaffeinated' Means Methylene Chloride

May 22, 2026

Walk down the coffee aisle of any supermarket and look at the decaf options. About half the bags will say "decaf" or "decaffeinated" and stop there. The other half will say "naturally decaffeinated" in slightly larger type, sometimes with a leaf icon next to it.

May 21, 2026

A lot of coffee drinkers have arrived at the same realization in the last few years. The full-caffeine all-day routine is not as productive as it felt in our twenties. Sleep gets worse. Anxiety creeps up. The afternoons feel worse, not better. The morning cup is no longer the only cup, and the syste

May 20, 2026

There is a specific cup of coffee that wrecks more sleep than any other in a typical day. It is the 2 PM one.

May 19, 2026

If you have searched "decaf for acid reflux" online, you have seen three answers in roughly equal proportion.

What Low Acid Coffee Actually Means

May 18, 2026

"Low acid coffee" is one of those phrases that means different things to different people and gets used loosely by both sides of the conversation.

May 17, 2026

Walk into any specialty coffee shop in 2026 and the decaf options have gotten more interesting. The good news is that the industry has finally taken decaf seriously. The less good news is that some of the marketing language got out ahead of the chemistry.

May 16, 2026

Three methods do the vast majority of the world's decaffeination. Two of them use chemical solvents. One uses water. The marketing language coming out of the industry would have you believe all three are equivalent, equally safe, and roughly comparable.

May 15, 2026

There are over four hundred known mycotoxins. The food science literature is enormous. Coffee, as a category, sits in a moderate-risk zone, lower than peanuts or maize, higher than meat or dairy.

May 14, 2026

The invoice from Eurofins came in at $398.42.

May 13, 2026

"Mycotoxin free" is one of the most repeated phrases in clean-coffee marketing and one of the least precise. It is doing a lot of work for the brand that prints it on the bag and very little work for the customer trying to figure out what is actually in their cup.

May 12, 2026

Most people who go looking for information about mold in coffee find Ochratoxin A first. It is the name in every article, the bogeyman in every supplement-side coffee brand's marketing, and the toxin the European Union has actually bothered to regulate.

May 10, 2026

Less than 2.0 micrograms per kilogram.