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Region: Pitalito, Huila
Altitude: 1,400 - 2100 m.a.s.l
Variety: Caturra, Castillo
Processing: Washed, sugarcane decaffeinated
Tasting notes: A syrupy, creamy, sweet coffee. We taste milk chocolate and fig along with honey and warm spice tones. You’ll notice it doesn’t taste like your typical decaf.
In 2020 El Carmen was the first ever sugarcane decaf we roasted, but since then we’ve consistently chosen this method as our preferred decaffeination process. We’re glad to have coffee from this association back on our lineup. It’s a very drinkable flavour profile with rich milk chocolate, a creamy body and tons of sweetness. Brew it in your preferred method and it’ll taste great with or without milk.
El Carmen was a pilot project started in 2018 by Raw Material, the social enterprise importer who brought us this coffee. They built processing and grading infrastructure where local farmers could dry and grade their own harvest. Access to the specialty market meant stable, sustainable prices for the producers for the first time. This template for developing excellent coffee in partnership with farmers in underappreciated regions has been repeated around the world; it’s at the heart of the value proposition of specialty coffee.
The sugarcane decaffeination process uses a naturally occurring compound, ethyl acetate, to remove the caffeine from coffee beans. Ethyl acetate is a food by-product found most commonly in the fermentation of fruits, and is present in both ripe bananas and beer for example. This coffee is called "sugarcane" decaf because the ethyl acetate used is from fermented sugarcane sourced in the southern region of Palmira, Colombia.
The process begins with steaming of the coffee, increasing its porosity, beginning the hydrolysis of caffeine, which is usually bonded to salts and chlorogenic acid in the bean. The beans are then submerged in an ethyl acetate solvent, until 97% of the caffeine is removed. Finally the coffee is steamed again to remove any residual ethyl acetate, and then dried to a stable moisture content for shipping.
The beauty of sugarcane decaffeination is that it helps preserve most of the original flavours of the coffee while enhancing its natural sweetness. It’s decaf that doesn’t taste like decaf!
A note about packaging
Our coffee comes packaged in beautiful and hard wearing tins. It is important to keep those beans away from air and light (see our blog post about coffee storage) and we think tins are the very best way of keeping those guys fresh.
Tins can of course be easily recycled (with other metals) but the very best and most environmentally conscious thing to do with them is to refill them. Find out how to refill or dispose of your Steampunk packaging HERE.
