I switched to tea during COVID
Then the caffeine caught up

I quit coffee in March 2020

I’d been a coffee drinker for 10 years but when COVID hit, my body started falling apart in ways I couldn’t ignore — acid reflux that wouldn’t quit, a tightness in my chest that made it hard to breathe. I went to the doctor. Turns out the coffee was making everything worse, especially under stress.

So I switched to tea. It worked. The mornings felt softer, the work felt steadier, and my stomach quit yelling at me by 11am.

Then the caffeine caught up

The thing nobody tells you when you switch from coffee to tea: tea also has a good amount of caffeine. Then I started reaching for a second cup in the afternoon, another one after dinner, and suddenly I was counting sheep at 4am, wondering what went wrong.

I went looking for a fix. Decaf coffee was everywhere but a decaf tea worth drinking didn’t exist. Either bad taste, or chemically decaffeinated products.

“I just wanted a cup at 9pm that didn’t follow me into the next morning. That shouldn’t be a hard ask.”

So I tried to fix it

I’m a foodie. I don’t trust resellers and wanted to know exactly where the leaf came from. So I went directly to the farms, walked the fields, watched the process. I was looking for teas that were naturally easy to drink, relaxing, built for the back half of your day. A few farmers got it. Those few became partners.

Then came the harder part…

Two years developing a CO₂ extraction process — chemical-free, dialed specifically for tea. The goal was simple and incredibly difficult: strip the caffeine while optimizing the flavor. We went back and forth more times than I can count.

The name is the whole idea

We live in a world that keeps adding. More notifications, more noise, more things competing for your attention.

I wanted to go the other direction.

“de-” is a prefix that means removal. De-stress. De-compress. De-caf. Taking something away to reveal what was already good underneath. Tea has been that ritual for centuries — a moment of quiet that people reached for when life gets loud. Not because it does something dramatic. Because it removes you, briefly, from everything that does.

That’s what de- is. Launched in 2026.