Sierra Sur Decaf

Origin: Oaxaca, Mexico

Process: Mountain Water Decaf

Varieties: Typica, Mundo Novo, Bourbon

Importer: Raw Material

Harvest: 2023

Per-Kilogram green price: £9.83

Amount purchased: 69kg

In Mexico, farm names for small scale producers such as these are very rare. This is because the average producer here owns and works on several small fields surrounding their village. As such, each village has its own structure for organising coffee production. Some are organised as private entities, where land is bought, sold, and passed onto children. Others are entirely communal, where parcels of land are shared and tended as a collective. Around 90% of the land in Oaxaca is communal. Some of the only private lands in the Oaxacan coffee regions are in the Sierra Sur and Mazateca.

Coffee from the Sierra Sur is transported to the Mountain Water decaf facility in Veracruz, north east of the coffee producing regions R.M. works with. For the processing, the station uses mineral water from Mexico’s highest peak, the Pico de Orizaba, or Citlaltépetl, which sits at 5,636 MASL. The process is chemical-free, immersing the green beans in a high pressure filtration system which gradually removes the caffeine. Once complete, the beans are re-dried and packed for export.

Mountain Water is similar to the CO2 or Sparkling Water process, and uses CO2 as the solvent to remove the caffeine from the green coffee extract.
All decaffeination methods use a solvent, it’s just the nature and source of this solvent that differs.