Lights Out Decaf

Our decaf starts with great coffee. The "pre-caffeinated" coffee comes from a small group of producers in the Suaza region of the south of Huila in Colombia. The coffee is grown in ideal conditions, and carefully picked and processed by these small growers. The lot is composed of small daylots of these farmers and the coffee varieties are excellent for quality - mainly Caturra, Castillo and the Colombia variety. Having a great coffee is crucial to ending up with a tasty decaf!

This decaf process is our favourite because the resulting coffee is always very sweet - like sweetness from a ripe fruit. If you want to know why, keep reading and dive deep with us into the process.

Alright, let's get a bit nerdy now and let's chat about the decaf process. Ethyl Acetate is a bit of scary "chemical" sounding name, but it helps to understand a bit of the basic chemistry.

Ethyl Acetate is an "ester" and it's derived from the reaction Ethanol (pure alcohol) and Acetic Acid (pure vinegar). Both of these are of course consumable by us! In our case, the Ethanol comes from the fermentation of sugar cane molasses (the sugar cane is grown in Colombia). During the decaf process the beans are heated with steam to open the pores, then an Ethyl Acetate wash is applied. This is one case where water (the universal solvent) is not the best choice.

Caffeine is very stubborn and difficult to remove and it's more soluble in Ethyl Acetate than water. Also, Ethyl Acetate boils off at only 77 degrees C, so it can be completely removed by washing the beans in hot water after the wash. The Ethyl Acetate is long gone before the coffee is ever roasted, but if any residual ever existed it would vanish in the roasting process, which heats the beans to over 200 degrees C.

Fun fact: Ethyl Acetate is naturally occurring in wine. As you can imagine from the above chemistry, it's produced when the grapes are fermented. Ethyl Acetate at the right concentration is actually sought after in wine as it contributes to a wine's perceived "fruitiness".