Sean D. Francis

Regular or Decaf? The Office Experiment. Day One.

Posted on 04 May 2009

A coworker of mine who is the first to arrive in the building, usually puts on a pot of coffee even though he doesn’t drink the stuff.  He only made regular coffee and only regular coffee would be made all day.  I told him that was fine and there was no reason to even brew decaf coffee.  This was mainly said to be assholish and because Alton Brown’s coffee episode highlighted the fact that cheap beans are used to make decaf and thus is inferior.  Snobbery on my part.

Well, he ignored me, as is his right (and honestly, sometimes it is the only way to deal with me) and started making a pot of decaf.  I really thought it would just sit there and be wasted.  Who, in their right minds, would choose decaf over regular coffee?  Well, we noticed that the pot would slowly be drained throughout the day.  This fact astonished me and I felt a need to document it.

Day One

The coffee was brewed at 7:00 am.  I arrived at 9:30 am and made my first documentation.

May 4th 9:30am

The levels are almost even.  We checked again at 11:00 am.

May 4th 11:00am

Regular takes a slight lead.  Now if logic prevails, people would start drinking decaf after lunch to avoid the caffeine effects leading into the afternoon.  The 1:30 pm check would be very interesting.

May 4th 1:30pm

Regular takes a huge lead! When the end of the day arrives, we got the final tally.

May 4th 5:00pm

So are the results conclusive?  Doubtful.  There may be a factor that since decaf hasn’t been made in this kitchen for so long that people just think it is regular coffee being brewed into the decaf pot and since decaf is the second brewed it appears to the the freshest.  People could simply be choosing the pot they think is the freshest coffee.  Tomorrow the position on the burners will be changed and we will see how that changes the results.