In The Cup
We roast this Decaf El Eden to work well in espresso and as a filter. We're getting loads of body with good sweetness, some toasted nut, chocolate and dried fruit...
In The Cup
We roast this Decaf El Eden to work well in espresso and as a filter. We're getting loads of body with good sweetness, some toasted nut, chocolate and dried fruit notes.
The Story
As is usually the case in Colombian, coffee is either washed and dried at the farm by smallholders, often on steep slopes, or brought to a nearby beneficiary. Sourced from a group of 10 farms within the Quindio department, coffee is then collated at the dry mill facility managed by local farm owner Hernan Israel Ocendo Usman in Armenia. We witnessed this process first hand on a recent trip to Colombia as a farmer unloaded a colourful sack of parchment to get weighed, graded and a price agreed in return for an empty sack to fill with more coffee.
The Variety
Picking from their mainly Castillo and Catimor planted fields, the coffee is typically wet processed the same day as picking and dried on either ‘Casa Elba’ Patios, drying beds either on rails themselves or with a roof that is on rails to protect from weather, or mechanical driers.
The Process
As the name suggests the Swiss Water Process of de-caffeinating the beans is a lot kinder to the environment. All methods of de-caffeinating involve some kind of solvent. In the Swiss Water Process it is just water, no other chemicals are needed just some extra time and patience. The beans are essentially soaked in water until all the flavour compounds have leached out.
This leaves behind a pile of inert beans and some super-flavoured green bean coffee water including the caffeine. This caffeine can then be filtered out using charcoal filters. The beans are then re-introduced to the super-flavoured green bean coffee water and they absorb all those good chemical flavour compounds back on board but without the caffeine.