Some of the decafs we have been most excited to roast over the last few years have all had one thing in common. The process is ethyl acetate decaffeination, usually shortened to EA or called sugarcane decaf. Right now that is a coffee from Felipe Restrepo in Colombia.
We sat down with our Director of Coffee, Evan Wood, to talk about how EA works, how this coffee found its way to us, and why we keep coming back to it.
How sugarcane decaf works
The compound used to decaffeinate the coffee here is ethyl acetate, a solvent that forms on its own wherever sugars ferment. That sharp, sweet, slightly solvent-like note lifting off overripe fruit, or off coffee drying on a patio, is ethyl acetate. Ethyl acetate has a strong affinity for caffeine and very little interest in the rest of what sits inside a coffee seed, so the caffeine can leave while the sugars stay put.
At Descafecol, the plant in Caldas that opened in 1988 and has long been Colombia's only decaffeination facility, that solvent is made from sugarcane, which is where the coffee picks up its nickname “Sugarcane Decaf”.
To start the process, the coffee arrives green and dry. It is steamed first, which swells the seeds and opens their structure so the solvent can reach the caffeine locked inside. Then it soaks in a warm bath of water and ethyl acetate, and the solvent moves through the coffee, latches onto the caffeine, and gets drained away carrying it.
Fresh solution goes back in and the cycle repeats, a little more caffeine leaving each time, until there is almost nothing left to find. From there the coffee is steamed again to clear any remaining solvent, dried down to a stable moisture level for storage, cooled slowly, and polished, leaving the facility looking like green coffee again and ready to roast like any other coffee.
Top 3 FAQs about this process:
Is it natural? Ethyl acetate occurs in nature and the version used here begins as sugarcane, but it is produced in a factory rather than squeezed out of a piece of fruit. Sugarcane decaf is a fair description of where the solvent comes from.
Is it safe? Yes, with wide margins. The FDA lists ethyl acetate as generally recognized as safe for use in food, and Descafecol works to a limit of 20 parts per million of residual solvent. Very little of even that survives the trip, since ethyl acetate boils at 77°C and roasting happens well north of 200°C.
How much caffeine is left? Almost none. US labeling requires at least 97% of it to be gone, and Descafecol goes further than that. Pour an eight ounce cup of decaf drip and you are looking at 2 to 15 mg of caffeine, against 95 to 135 in the caffeinated version of the same drink.
Grab a bag of the EA Decaf here.
Learn about Felipe Restrepo’s Decaf
Felipe Restrepo's decaf came to us through our friends at Ally Coffee, and it took some hunting. Since nearly all of the EA decaffeination in Latin America moves through one facility, supply arrives in waves of availability"With the increasing popularity of EA decafs, sourcing them can be a little tricky," Evan said. "Most, if not all, of the EA decaffeination that happens in Latin America happens at Descafecol in Caldas, Colombia. So when Descafecol gets backed up from sheer volume, roasters might have to scramble a bit. As we were roasting through the final bags of our previous EA decaf, I reached out to most of our closest partners to track some down - and Ally was the only importing partner that had any inventory available. And lucky for us - Felipe's decaf is absolutely delicious."
"This coffee is the result of a powerhouse father-son duo," Evan said. "While Juan Felipe operates their farm, Finca Chambakú, the story of Chambakú started with his father, Elmer. Elmer laid the foundation of their coffee footprint, beginning his coffee production journey at just sixteen, and Juan Felipe took his father's work, refined it, and infused it with a new found curiosity about coffee processing and fermentation."
Juan Felipe Restrepo at Finca Chambakú. Photo courtesy of Ally Coffee.
Elmer spent about four decades building the coffee farm on instinct and repetition. Juan Felipe grew up inside that work and brought his own obsession to it, chasing innovative fermentation and processing, plus rebuilding the coffee mill along the way, until it ran on a fraction of the water it once did. The coffee lot in your bag is Caturra and Cenicafé 1, grown and washed at Chambakú before it was sent to a decaffeination plant.
Why we choose EA Decaffeinated Coffees
We taste through a lot of decaf, deliberately and at length, and the same thing keeps happening.
"We've spent a ton of time thinking about and tasting through decaffeination processes and, without fail, ethyl acetate decafs maintain origin characteristics, complexity, and clarity far above the other various processing methods," Evan said.
None of that is a knock on the alternatives, EA simply leaves the lightest fingerprint on the profile in our experience. The origin survives it, the sweetness survives it, and the coffee still tastes like itself rather than like the process it went through. On our cupping table, EA decafs score higher with enough consistency that we stopped treating it as coincidence.
How it tastes, and how to brew it
We taste chocolate, molasses, and citrus in this one. It’s round and creamy without any distracting weight to it, and the citrus keeps surfacing in the finish long after you would expect the chocolate to have taken over.
One variable adjustment matters a lot here, according to Evan: grind size.
"I think the major consideration to make with any decaf is making sure you grind significantly more coarse than usual," Evan said. "The decaffeination process is pretty intrusive to the physical structure of a coffee, making the final roasted coffee more brittle than normal. Since the seeds are more brittle, grinding at a normal setting will often create a larger cross-section of fines or coffee dust - clogging up your brew bed and overextracting the soluble matter in the coffee grounds."
So go coarser than instinct tells you. Start two or three clicks above your usual pour over setting, and keep going if the water pools in the bed as you pour. A good place to begin is 22g of coffee and 350g of water at 205°F, with a 60g bloom for 45 seconds, then pours to 200g and on to 350g, finishing somewhere around three minutes.
"Tasting decaf coffees can be strange sometimes," Evan said. "Our brains are used to sensing coffee with its bitterness intact. Since caffeine is responsible for a large portion of the bitterness in coffee, thoughtfully tasting coffees void of caffeine can often trick our brains and muddle our senses."
If the first sip reads sweeter or lighter than you braced for, that could be your palate recalibrating rather than the coffee coming up short. Sit with it, take a second pass, and let it show you what it has.
Shop the EA Decaf from Felipe Restrepo.
