Nimbus Decaf

We love the coffee industry’s growing attention to high quality decaf. Since the start we have been looking for great decaffeinated lots and have found some beautiful coffees along the way. 

Nimbus is the first of 2 pink bourbon EA decafs that we will be releasing, both from Villamaria in Colombia, imported by Raw Material. The Pink Bourbon cherries travel down the mountain to Jamaica, where the RM Colombia team constructed a drying facility. The station sits several hundred metres downhill from the producers, making good use of the higher temperatures closer to sea level, which ensure a consistent drying environment for coffee.

Selling cherry, as opposed to processing coffee into parchment, is still contrary to the norm in such a large producing country like Colombia. Though different from traditional production, the end result is less labour intensive and more profitable for the producers. There is less need to maintain costly equipment, and all of the pulping, processing, and drying is completed by the team at Jamaica. These inputs return high cup quality, which in turn produce higher profitability for those who grew the coffee.

Sugar cane decaffeination is often termed as a natural process decaf. Ethyl Acetate is an organically existing compound (C4H8O2) and by-product found most commonly in the fermentation of fruits and is present in both ripe bananas and beer for example. The EA process is relatively simple. The coffee beans are moistened with water and EA is circulated throughout. The EA binds with the caffeine in the bean and extracts the caffeine while leaving most of the other flavor compounds. After the desired caffeine level is reached, the EA residue on the beans is removed by steaming them.