This coffee comes from the municipality of Argelia which is situated in the south west of the department of Cauca. Cauca is the fourth largest producer of specialty coffee in Colombia, with around 90,000 small holder farmers all producing coffee on approximately 1 hectare of land. Siruma Coffee, a small specialty female-led exporter, launched a project this past season that started in 2020 in Argelia for an initial 15 month period, until early 2022.

The coffee first undergoes steaming at low pressures to remove the silver skins, before then being moistened with hot water to allow the beans to swell and soften. This then prepares the coffee for the hydrolysis of caffeine, which is attached to the salts of the chlorogenic acid within the coffee.

The extractors (naturally obtained from the fermentation of sugar cane and not from chemical synthesis) are then filled with moistened coffee, which is washed several times with the natural ethyl acetate solvent to reduce the caffeine down to the correct levels. Once this process is finished, the coffee must then be cleaned of the remaining ethyl acetate by using a flow of low pressured saturated steam.

 

From here, the coffee is sent to vacuum drying drums where the water previously used to moisten the beans is removed, and the coffee dried to between 10-12%. The coffee is then cooled quickly to ambient temperature using fans, before the final step of carnauba wax being applied to polish and provide the coffee with protection against environmental conditions, and to help provide stability.