This lovely Colombian decaf does not disappoint when it comes to the "too-good-to-be-decaf" criterion we apply when choosing our decafs. It is rounded and chocolatey with a balanced acidity and sweetness that reminded us of mandarin oranges and brown sugar.  Simply decafilicious!
 
Background:
 
This coffee comes from the department of Huila in Colombia. The producer group Mártir was established in 2019 by Didier Javier Pajoy Ico. The  members of the group either use natural farming practices or are working towards adopting them. Didier has invested significant time in teaching producers how to create their own fertilizers from organic materials produced mostly on-farm and manage wastewater from coffee processing responsibly. Mártir's mission is to produce exceptional coffee with minimal environmental impact.
 
For this particular lot, the coffee cherries are hand-picked, sorted, depulped and fermented in water tanks. After that, the seeds are dried in the sun, milled and transported to the local decaffeination plant. Here they use Ethyl Acetate (EA) for the decaffeination process, a natural byproduct from the sugarcane industry in the country.
 
How exactly is the caffeine taken out of the coffee, you ask? The ethyl acetate is used to flush out the caffeine. The process begins with steaming the coffee, increasing its porosity, triggering the chemical breakdown of the bond between the caffeine, salts and chlorogenic acid in the bean. The beans are then submerged in the solvent, until 97% of the caffeine is removed. A final steam serves to remove residual traces of the compound. It all sounds very technical but in fact, this way of getting rid of the caffeine is widely regarded as the least disruptive to the beans and is often referred to as natural process decaf. And the result in the cup speaks for itself – simply delicious.