Decaf La Serrania Colombia

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Region: Huila
Altitude:  1,500-1,750 m.a.s.l
Variety: Castillo, Caturra, Colombia
Processing: Washed, sugarcane decaffeinated

UK Arrival: August 2025

Tasting notes: A naturally sweet coffee, you’ll taste brown sugar and banana bread flavours layered with toasted nuts, cacao and a luxurious, rich mouthfeel. 

Back for a third time, this regional lot is among our favourite decafs. Naturally sweet with ripe fruitiness, it evokes warm banana bread. Sugarcane process decaf is scarce these days—only one Colombian plant, Descafecol, produces it, and demand is outpacing supply. We’ll keep sourcing the best-tasting decaf we can. For now, enjoy this lot while it lasts!

La Serranía is produced by multiple growers along an isolated set of mountains within the central cordillera of the Andes that goes through Pitalito, Acevedo, Palestina, Timaná and Suaza. The coffee is carefully hand-sorted and processed at each individual farm, with special attention paid to the drying process to ensure consistency, uniformity and a clean cup profile.

This coffee was decaffeinated at the Descafecol plant in Manizales, the only decaffeination plant in the Andean region of Colombia. Descafecol uses ethyl acetate derived from sugarcane production in Palmira, about 4 hours drive away.

Ethyl acetate is an organic compound with a sweet smell. It’s created during fermentation and contributes to what’s often described as the “fruitiness” in a young wine.

At Descafecol, the decaffeination process begins with steaming the green coffee at a very low pressure to remove the silver skin that sometimes still clings to the bean after dry milling. The beans are then moistened with hot water to soften them and begin hydrolysis of the caffeine, which is bonded to salts of chlorogenic acid.

The ethyl acetate solvent is then circulated through the beans multiple times until at least 97 percent of the caffeine is removed. A low-pressure, saturated steam is then applied to remove any last traces of ethyl acetate, and finally the coffee is vacuum-dried in drums to remove any water and bring the final moisture level to between 10 and 12 percent. The coffee is cooled to ambient temperature with fans and then polished with carnauba wax to protect it against humidity. 

The beauty of sugarcane decaffeination is that it helps preserve most of the original flavours of the coffee while enhancing its natural sweetness. It’s decaf that doesn’t taste like decaf!

Have you tried natural decaffeinated coffee? - Descafecol

Decafecol Ethyl Acetate Decafe from Cauca, Colombia (interamericancoffee.com)

A note about packaging

Our coffee comes packaged in beautiful and hard wearing tins. It is important to keep those beans away from air and light (see our blog post about coffee storage) and we think tins are the very best way of keeping those guys fresh. 

Tins can of course be easily recycled (with other metals) but the very best and most environmentally conscious thing to do with them is to refill them. Find out how to refill or dispose of your Steampunk packaging HERE.