The weather forecast was for about a foot of snow and the snow is still falling as I write this. A lot of people are still working on shoveling, so business is a little slow. This has given me the opportunity to work on the decaffeinated blends.
A while back I ran out of decaffeinated Brazil, which I was roasting as both a medium roast and as a French roast. This was used in both of our decaffeinated blends. A new lot of decaffeinated Colombian worked well for French Roast, but I had no easy substitute for the medium roast Brazil.
I started with European Blend, deciding to try simply substituting the Colombian for Brazil. It tasted weak and lacked body. The decaffeinated Colombian has good body, so I reduced the French Roast content and increased the Colombian content. This produced a richer coffee, but it was no longer dark enough. I decided to bring the French Roast content up to midway between the last two attempts, reduce the Colombian content, and introduce a little Sumatran. This was really good and tasted like European blend.
For espresso, I suspected that the decaf Colombian would not be complex enough for a direct substitution to work. I split that portion of the blend between Colombian and Mexican and that turned out to be very good.