Later, as more companies got into the premium-coffee game, the best beans usually went into signature blends and single-origin offerings. Second-rate beans went to the decaffeination plant. “I think there was and still is an idea in the trade that it’s just decaf, so use what you can get away with,” said Doug Welsh, the vice president for coffee at Peet’s Coffee & Tea and a pioneer in better-tasting decaffeinated coffee. “That’s why the vast majority of decaf isn’t very good. They didn’t start out with the same coffee.”

The decaffeination process itself doesn’t help. There are only a few methods to remove the caffeine, but they all begin the same way: with soaking in water or steaming. That means raw beans arrive from the decaffeination plant in a kind of prebrewed state, their flavor already compromised.

Now, the new breed of boutique roasters who focus extraordinary levels of attention on finding good beans are changing the art of decaf. As a result, decaffeinated coffee can have all the pedigree and, often, all the flavor any coffee geek could want.

First, they select raw coffee that retains its flavor, acidity and body even when it is roughed up in the decaffeination process. Then they roast with a gentle hand. And they try to make sure the beans move from farm to cup as quickly as possible, because coffee is an agricultural product and its quality declines with time.

“If you drink it strong, store it carefully and use it up quickly,” Blue Bottle Coffee advises customers who buy its Decaf Noir beans, “you will be rewarded with very big flavors.”