Ciao Decaf Beans 10x500g

A guest who avoids caffeine still expects a decent cup, and handing them a jar of instant undermines everything else on the menu. Ciao Decaf answers that with a proper decaffeinated espresso bean, supplied in a format that keeps an open pack small while the rest of the case stays sealed and fresh on the shelf.

How much decaf a site really sells

Decaf is a low-volume, high-visibility line. It rarely accounts for much of the day’s takings, but the customer who orders it is usually the one who notices most what they are given, and they are often ordering for a whole table. Restaurants and hotels meet it at the end of dinner, cafés meet it mid-afternoon, and care, education and workplace settings meet it wherever somebody is caffeine-sensitive. In all of them it sells steadily and never in volume, which is why the format matters as much as the roast.

Roast profile and character

Beans are sourced from farms in Costa Rica, Brazil and Sumatra, then taken to a dark roast, which is what allows a decaf to hold its own against milk. Expect a heavy, chocolate-leaning cup with the low acidity that comes from that darker development, and a thick, silky crema that looks right in the cup instead of thin and pale. The caffeine is low; the flavour is not.

What arrives in the case

• Ten 500g bags, 5kg of beans in total
• A one-way degassing valve on every bag to protect freshness
• A dark roast profile that suits espresso and milk-based drinks alike

Grinding and extraction

Ground for espresso, it extracts at a similar rate to a standard dark blend, so switching between hoppers rarely calls for a wholesale change of settings. It grinds well in bean to cup machines and traditional espresso machines alike, and keeping the roast profile close to your caffeinated house blend saves a good deal of trouble, because the grind and the extraction time then stay in roughly the same territory.

Running it beside your house bean

On a bean to cup machine with a second hopper, decaf simply becomes another button and nobody has to leave the counter. On a traditional setup it usually means a second grinder, a single-dose routine, or a pre-ground sachet kept under the counter for the handful of orders that come in. Our guide to choosing beans for a bean to cup machine goes further into how blends behave once they are in a hopper, and the bean to cup machines we supply will happily run two blends side by side.

Where a different format wins

If decaf leaves your counter only now and then, sealed pre-ground sachets are often the more sensible buy, because there is no grinder to clean down and no risk of beans outliving their freshness. If decaf is genuinely popular with your customers, whole beans give the better cup and the better cost per shot, and a second hopper standing empty repays itself in convenience alone. You can see the full Ciao coffee bean line-up alongside this one.

Storage, rotation and waste

Keep unopened bags somewhere cool, dry and out of direct light, and leave the valve to do its job; there is nothing to be gained by decanting beans into a display jar. Rotate the case so the oldest bag is always the one in use, and seal the open bag between services. In the machine, run the hopper down and refill rather than topping it up endlessly, so the beans at the bottom are not sitting for weeks under a warm lid. A large sack opened in January is stale long before it is finished, whereas a 500g bag opened this week is still tasting as intended when the last shot comes out of it. None of this is onerous, but on a slow-moving line it is the difference between a decaf worth ordering twice and one that gets ordered once.