Sourced through the wonderful team at Raw Material, this Sugarcane Decaf lot comes from the El Carmen community association whom they've been buying and growing with since 2017. Like many producing countries, the coffee market in Colombia can be an enormously unstable source of income for those with farms. RM have worked with El Carmen to secure more consistent and reliable pricing for their producers and over time have helped build drying beds for green coffee alongside quality control infrastructure within the community hub, all to great effect.
The coffee has been decaffeinated using the Ethyl Acetate or “Sugarcane” method, as the ethyl acetate solution is derived from fermented sugarcane, with the plant being abundant in the region. The plant El Cerman work with in Colombia uses water from the Navado del Ruis (a volcano between Caldas and Tolima) and natural ethyl acetate from fermented sugarcane sourced in the southern region of Palmira, Colombia. The green coffee is steamed before being submerged in the solution wherein the ethyl acetate compound binds to the caffeine molecules, removing them as the coffee emerges from the solution, but removing little else and, we believe, maintaining the beautifully ripe fruit and sweet characteristics of the coffee.
