Mexico Decaf

This is decaffeinated with ethyl acetate. The previous page for this coffee said it was decaffeinated with pure mountain water in Mexico, never left the country, and contained no chemicals. None of that describes this lot.

Say what it is. The coffee is from Esmeralda, in Mexico, from smallholder farmers growing a mix of high-altitude coffee varieties, processed natural. Royal decaffeinates it with ethyl acetate. EA is a naturally occurring organic compound found in many fruits and vegetables, and it can also be synthesized for coffee decaffeination. The green beans are steamed or soaked to expand them, then soaked in EA, caffeine bonds with the compound and is drawn out, and the coffee comes out of the solvent, gets rinsed thoroughly, re-dried, and re-bagged for transport. That is the process, and it is a solvent process.

There is a reason to say that plainly rather than work around it. Buyers who care about decaffeination care about which method was used, because the methods trade against each other. A water process avoids solvent but can strip more aroma. EA takes a different route and tends to leave aromatic coffees more intact. Calling this one a water process would not protect anyone; it would just make the label useless.

The coffee itself is natural process, which sets it apart from most decaf on the shelf. Washed decafs are built on chocolate and caramel because washing strips the fruit off the bean. A natural keeps the fruit dried around the seed, so the sugars go into the bean and the cup carries more of the fruit character. Combined with Mexican coffee grown at altitude across a range of high-altitude varieties, you get a decaf that tastes like coffee rather than like an absence.

“Ethyl acetate is a naturally occurring compound, and saying so plainly is more useful to a buyer than calling this coffee chemical-free.”

Royal’s cup for this lot is cocoa powder and bright. Cocoa powder first — not a chocolate bar, not a drink, the dry, unsweetened kind that sits at the back of the tongue. Under it, a bright, clean note that keeps the cup from going flat. It is lighter in the body than our darker decafs, which is what you would expect from a natural processed coffee, and it tastes closer to its caffeinated counterpart than most decaf does.

We roast it medium. Decaffeinated beans take heat faster than standard green, so this one moves quicker through the roaster than you would plan for a Mexican with its caffeine intact. Ease the heat early and drop sooner than feels right. The cocoa needs enough development to come forward without the natural fruit turning into generic roast.

Brew it on pour-over or in a batch brewer. The cocoa and the bright note separate more clearly with a clean filter than they do in a French press, and 1:16 at 200°F is a good place to start. A slightly coarser grind than you would use for the caffeinated version will help, since the beans are more porous and give up their solubles faster. This is a coffee you can drink at two in the afternoon and still be asleep by eleven.

We’ve been roasting coffee in Lakewood, Colorado under our neighborhood brand, Village Roaster, since 1979.

Buying green? The 2, 5 and 10 lb options are raw, unroasted coffee beans. They arrive as green coffee and cannot be brewed as they are. Roast them first, then brew.