Coffee Varietal: Castillo, Caturra
Harvest Year: February 2022
Coffee Process: Washed / Ethyl Acetate Decaffeination
It’s not often when an export partner offers a decaffeinated coffee with the same enthusiasm given to other lots. Well here is one from Azahar Coffee, sourcing company and exporter, originally began as a specialty roaster and coffee boutique in Bogotá serving Colombia’s top quality microlots to a developing local consumer base. From this niche, Azahar made international connections for their farmer contacts, and started exporting green coffee with individual farm traceability and ambitious price transparency. Azahar now partners with a network of Colombian growers who understand the specialty market potential, and markets their coffee directly to buyers internationally on a quality-based pricing scale.
The net effect of the intervention is often significantly more money than a farm could receive without the added exposure and marketing. So taking the sum of all of these micro-lot parts to create a decaffeinated blend naturally had to be called the Rainbow Blend. While traceability to a single farm or origin is not the focus here, the Azahar way of doing business is the origin of this blend.
Azahar was also intentional about blending coffee from similar elevations and the same traditional washed processing from producers who use the same careful and consistent protocols for sorting cherries, depulping, fermenting, washing and gently drying coffee.
Azahar decaffeinated the coffee using a process called Descafecol, which is a solvent based process where caffeine is removed from the coffee beans using a solvent called ethyl acetate (a natural extract distilled from sugar cane, blackberries, beets or sometimes grapes). The coffee seeds are steamed to open the pores and then rinsed in ethyl acetate repeatedly to remove the caffeine.
