Tolima Decaf

El Vergel farm is located in Tolima, Colombia near the town of Fresno and was established by the Bayter family in 1995, with avocados as their main crop. In 2006 they decided to diversify into coffee cultivation and in the years since have developed the estate into an innovative specialty coffee operation. Currently operated by brother Elias and Shady Bayter and their mother Martha Montenegro, El Vergel grows a wide array of varieties and embraces new post-harvest processing techniques. This lot of red and yellow caturra was decaffeinated with the sugar cane method at Descafecol in Caldas, Colombia - more on that below - and yields a vibrant, sweet coffee with a silky body and notes of red berries and chocolate.

Descafecol is the only decaffeination plant in the Andean region of Colombia. The plant relies entirely on the pure water from the Navado el Ruis (a snow-capped volcano on the border of the departments of Caldas and Tolima) and natural ethyl acetate from sugar cane plants in Palmira, Colombia.

Ethyl acetate is an organic compound (C4H8O2) with a sweet smell—it’s created during fermentation and contributes to what’s often described as the “fruitiness” in a young wine.

At Descafecol, the decaffeination process begins with steaming the green coffee at a very low pressure to remove the silver skins. The beans are then moistened with hot water, which causes them to swell and soften and begins the hydrolysis of the caffeine, which is bonded to salts of chlorogenic acid. (Hydrolysis refers to water interacting with a compound and causing it to loosen from other particles.)

The ethyl acetate solvent is then circulated through the beans multiple times until at least 97 percent of the caffeine is removed. A low-pressure, saturated steam is then applied to remove any last traces of the ethyl acetate, and finally the coffee is vacuum-dried in drums to remove any water and bring the final moisture level to between 10 and 12 percent.

Orders placed Monday - Thursday by 9am will be roasted and shipped the same day. Orders placed after our daily or weekly cutoff will be roasted the next scheduled production day. All online orders are shipped within 24 hours of roasting.