About this Coffee
A robust decaf coffee that maintains a mellow and pleasant sweetness.
This decaf coffee has a beautiful richness that anyone who enjoys darker roasted coffees will appreciate. Like all our classics, this coffee is dark and well-developed but lacks the bitterness that overly roasted coffee is known for. Enjoy it black, or with cream and sugar. Either way, you won’t even realize it’s decaf.
This coffee comes to us from Marcala, Honduras but it is decaffeinated by Descamex in Veracruz, Mexico. Descamex uses a method of decaffeinating coffee that they’ve named Mountain Water Process (or MWP). In this process, beans are soaked in a proprietary, organically derived solution that is designed to use reverse osmosis in order to remove over 99% of the caffeine from coffee.
How it’s decaffeinated
The first step in decaffeinating via the Descamex Mountain Water Process is steaming the beans. This step makes the coffee beans soft and porous in preparation for soaking. From there, the coffee beans go through multiple rounds of soaking in its respective specific chemical solution. The solution contains all the chemical compounds that make up coffee except for one: caffeine. The idea is that the solution is so inundated with these compounds that there isn’t any more room for anything but the caffeine to be extracted.
Once the beans have had their caffeine extracted, it’s time to dry them again. At this point, the goal is to get their moisture content to between 10% and 12%. There are 3 different types of dryers the beans move through over the next 24 hours. Once fully dry, the coffee beans are sorted for defects and remove excess chaff. This second sorting phase is a big part of why Mountain Water Processed decafs arrive so clean.
Finally, the last step in the Descamex Mountain Water Process is testing. Coffee samples are brought to a lab where their caffeine content is measured. At the Descamex lab, they make sure that the level of caffeine falls below their level of tolerance, less than .01%.