¡Hola Colombia!
Our final Colombian lots for 2024 have landed and are now ready for dispatch! After cupping through the landed samples, we’re excited to report the coffees are tasting distinct and vibrant. We can’t wait to share these delicious coffees with our roasting community and taste them through your production roasts.
Published 3 Dec 2024
While most of the coffees in the container have now sold out, we’re delighted to offer our first ever decaffeinated lot — the delicious and transparent San Antonio Decaf — which is tasting great and still available to order. With Fleur having just visited the decaffeination plant on her recent trip to Colombia, we’re confident that we can offer this lot on an ongoing basis to our customers. Read on to learn why we’re so excited about this coffee!
When considering adding a decaffeinated line to our offerings in the past, we always maintained that it was only worthwhile if we could bring something new to the market: a coffee that excelled in terms of quality and traceability — regardless of caffeine content — sourced through strong relationships and responsible practices. The coffee had to meet our strict quality expectations, have great longevity and consistency, and be as straightforward to roast as our other coffee offerings. Recently, technical advancements in the decaffeination process have given us confidence we can finally achieve these goals. And so, earlier this year, we set out to do just that!
Knowing a Colombian lot would meet many of our quality criteria, and would have the potential for year-round and ongoing availability, we turned to our longtime supply partners, Pergamino. In choosing the lot to decaffeinate, it made sense to source from a community with a proven track record for clean and sweet coffees, and strong ties to the team. Grown in the hills surrounding the small town of San Antonio, Cauca, the lot we chose is a regional blend contributed to by 14 independent smallholder producers, whose coffees we have regularly featured in the past. Having invested heavily in the region, Pergamino are well-connected with the San Antonio community, who represent some of the strongest supply relationships in their network.
For the decaffeination process, the lot was sent to the Descafecol plant in the nearby state of Manizales, where they use ethyl acetate (a naturally occurring compound derived from fermented sugarcane) to gently remove caffeine while maintaining the sugars and cellular structure of the coffees. Along with processing the coffee locally and using an efficient method that minimally impacts physical quality, we have also chosen to package this lot in vacuum-packed cartons: measures that we expect to contribute to its overall quality, consistency and longevity.
Cupping San Antonio Decaf next to its fully caffeinated counterpart, we have been blown away by their similarity — not just in profile, but also in texture and intensity of flavour. Clean and well-structured, the decaffeinated lot has a distinct buttery mouthfeel and notes of stewed apple, fresh cream and sweet almond. From our internal testing, it’s performing great as a manual pour over, batch, and espresso, and we can’t wait to start seeing it through production roasts. If you’re keen to have a taste, simply reach out for sample.
