Colombia Select Decaf Coffee Beans
Deets
- Country
- Colombia
- Elevation
- 1400m
- Processing Method
- Sugarcane Washed
- Variety
- Caturra Variedad
Tasting Notes
Description
250g bags are now available for in store pick up!
When it comes to decaf, there is no better way to process decaf coffee than Ethyl Acetate. We believe this process to be the best natural way to decaffeinate a coffee without taking away from the flavor or the structural integrity of the bean. Swiss Water Process is another natural way to decaffeinate coffee, however this process damages the structure of the beans in a way that greatly affects the quality and flavor of the coffee. One other well known way of decaffeinating coffee is Methylene Chloride. This process uses chemicals not only harms the coffee, but probably not good for your health either.
Below is a quick explanation of the process provided by Cafe Imports.
Ethyl Acetate (E.A.) – This naturally occurring ester (present in bananas as well as a by-product of fermented sugars) can be isolated and used as a solvent to bond with and remove caffeine from green coffee. First, the coffee is sorted and steamed for 30 minutes under low pressure in order to open the coffee seeds’ pores and prepare them for decaffeination. The coffee is placed in a solution of both water and ethyl acetate, where the E.A. will begin to bond with the salts of chlorogenic acids inside the seeds. The tank will be drained and re-filled over the course of eight hours until the caffeine is no longer detected. The seeds are steamed once more to remove the ethyl acetate traces, though E.A. is only harmful to humans in very high quantities (400 parts per million or more). The coffee is then dried and polished for export.
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Coffee Subscriptions
250g Bag
You select how often you want a delivery, we do the rest. One flat price plus shipping. We give you a new, unique single-origin coffee from our selection that’s hot off the roaster. You get it delivered straight to your door at peak roast time.
Subscribers will get to sample all of our current roasts, except for our Modern American and 431. In addition, we’ll include our limited-edition roasts in your subscription at no extra charge to you. Most of the time these never make the online store, and are only in our shop for a short period.
For freshness, we recommend getting shipments as frequently as possible. Cancel or change your subscription any time, no charge (you’ll receive instructions via email).
As a coffee roasting company, our passion is to always highlight the flavors that are unique to each region, processing style, and variety and this is most commonly done with lighter trending roast styles. The 431 is the only coffee that we showcase with what a well done slightly darker roast should taste like. The components are rotating quarterly to continue our vision of seasonality in coffee.
In 2019 we had the opportunity to again visit Guatemala. We arrived at the Guatemala City airport and immediately drove about three hours west to a small town on one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, Lago Atitlan. Perched on the cliffs surrounding the lake is a small town called Panajachel where we stay while visiting San Isidro Chacaya farm. After a few days we drove back east to Acatenango to Tehuya Estate.
The former president of Anacafe (the Guatemala coffee association) Miguel Medina grows a varietal focused, shade covered, wild forest feeling plot of coffee. With unique shade trees and innovative employee practices we have found our second Guatemala coffee partner and are excited to be working closely with Miguel to form a strategic partnership in which Lineage will contract parcels of the land to be farmed exclusively for us. We couldn't be happier with this very dense Catuai coffee.
This coffee is very special and could be roasted light and still be incredible but because of the sweetness in the cup and density of the bean it tastes even better when roasted a little heavier to our 431 espresso profile. Look for notes of roasted marshmallows with a roast and earthy taste.
This coffee coming from Palestina, Colombia is a great installment of our beloved Modern American espresso. As always, our goal with Modern American is to source and roast a coffee that has a great body for espresso to where we can roast it lighter so that we can highlight the complex sweetness of the coffee. To accomplish this, we roast this coffee slowly to bring out the sweetness, but we don’t roast it too dark so that we don’t taste too much roastiness. Although we call it an espresso roast, this coffee is also perfect for any other brew method, especially a batch brewer.
Our friends over at Atlantic Specialty Coffee helped us source this coffee from Palestina. This is a blend of coffee from 20 different specialty coffee-producing families. This group has its own collection center with a quality lab where they individually evaluate the physical and sensory quality of each lot by producer and then separate them according to profile and cup score prior to the final blend.
This group of producers were kind enough to give us their notes on the processing of their coffee. The producers use a traditional washed process because this allows the coffee to exhibit the characteristics of the regional terroir. This region is known for a very fine acidity, citrus notes, yellow fruit, a very marked sweetness and accentuated cleanliness. The producers use long fermentation times because the low temperatures of the region allow for a slow and constant process that contributes to the complexity in the cup. Drying is mainly done in the sun, in "casillas" or parabolic dryers, the process takes an average of 15 days.
The region of Palestina is well known for the quality of coffee being exported. Producers from this region have won the Cup of Excellence multiple times over the years.
Its geographic location provides ideal climate conditions for the production of specialty coffee. Coffee is grown there from 1,600 to 1,900 meters above sea level, with temperatures that oscillate between 16 and 25 ºC. The region's soils are fertile, derived from volcanic ash, and the varieties that are cultivated are mainly Caturra, Colombia and Tabi. The farms vary in size from 2 to 10 hectares, which each contain between 10 and 50 coffee trees.
We thought this was the perfect coffee to roast to our Modern American profile because of the density of the beans. The coffee offers nice canned peach sweetness with an almost ginger ale like sparking mouthfeel.