There are a few signals that the season is changing here at the roastery in Arkansas. First, the leaves begin to change, and a slight chill in the air will creep in each morning. Just as significant, if you’re a roaster or green buyer, is the arrival of micro-lots from the harvest in Inzá, truly marking the beginning of the autumn/ winter season. In keeping with the markers of time, we have worked into a rhythm with our friends at Pergamino. Each July we fly to Medellin to visit a few farms and cup through micro-lots at the newly renovated Pergamino lab. Throughout the harvest the team there flags coffees that we have existing relationships with, or new coffees that align with our sourcing values and quality standards. This is truly the backbone of much of what we do at Onyx, as we build lots that will make up most of our Monarch blend, as well as Southern Weather and Geometry. This season, we partnered with the team there to raise the level of our decaf offering by sourcing and building a regional blend, consisting of micro-lots from San Antonio, Inzá. This is not a new coffee for us by a long stretch; we have been buying coffee from this region for almost a decade. The new partnership is the intentional sourcing in order to create a high-quality decaf offering from a direct partnership. Once we put together several micro-lots at the dry mill to build this regional lot, we sent it off to the EA Decaffeination facility so it could be decaffeinated and returned. Read more on that process below.

EA DECAFFEINATION
Sugar cane ethyl acetate or commonly known as EA decaf is a natural process of decaffeinating coffee. It is usually found in Colombia where sugar cane is readily available and starts with making molasses from sugar cane. Once created, it sits in vats to ferment. The bacteria produce acetic acid, much like fermenting coffee, and at the peak of fermentation, alcohol is added to make something called ethyl acetate.
For it to be applied to coffee first, the green coffee is steamed in tanks to elevate the moisture level — the beans swell, which allows the extraction of caffeine. Ethyl acetate is added to the mixture, and it dissolves the caffeine in the coffee. The coffee is then washed with water and laid to dry. In theory, the coffee should reach the same moisture content as it arrived in, which is somewhere between 11-12%. The most important part of EA coffee, and why it tastes so sweet, is it avoids high pressure and high heat, which degrades coffee quickly. This allows the natural terroir flavors to come through, making it a sweet and bright decaf.