Cultivation
More than 500,000 farmers produce coffee in Mexico. Smallholders with less than 10 hectares compose a full 70% of Mexico’s coffee producers.
Due to their small size, most farm work is done by the family. Most farms are organic by default and many are certified.
Mountain Water Process
Young consumers are driving decaf’s resurgence and, like their caffeine-drinking peers, they’re expecting high-quality coffees that are often traceable and certified. With more than 50% of the world’s population under 30, the demand for decaffeinated coffee – and the need for specialty decaf that tastes good and meets ethical or environmental standards – is rising.
Mountain Water process offers an alternative to consumers concerned by methyl chloride (MC) and ethyl acetate (EA) processes. Because water processing does not use added chemical compounds, coffees can maintain organic certifications and customers can be assured of the absence of additional chemicals.
The difficulty of decaffeination is that many of the flavor compounds that give coffee its excellent taste are, like caffeine, water-soluble. Thus, any decaffeination method needs to effectively single out and remove the caffeine molecule while preserving as many of the flavor compounds as possible.
The process begins with a batch of green coffee beans that are soaked in water to remove the caffeine. In water, many of the flavor compounds are also removed as well, but don’t worry! This is intentional and will preserve help flavor in the future.
This first batch of beans are then discarded. This process only needs to happen once because the mixture produced by soaking those beans, called green coffee extract (GCE), can be maintained and reused to decaffeinate many batches of green beans.
The principle behind water processing is that water can only absorb a set amount of flavor compounds and caffeine before it is completely saturated. When water is fully saturated, it cannot accept (and remove) any more flavor compounds, even if they’re in the coffee. That first batch of beans created a fully saturated water mixture, the GCE. In order to process the beans for decaffeination, the GCE is run through a filter to remove only the caffeine.
Now the GCE is fully saturated except for caffeine. When a new batch of green beans are placed in the GCE, the only compound from the new beans that will be accepted into the GCE is caffeine, everything else will remain in the beans because the GCE is already saturated with those chemicals and unable to ‘take’ anymore.
Rainforest Alliance
RFA stands for Rainforest Alliance, a certification system that emphasizes climate-smart agriculture. RFA farms have at least 40% of land covered by canopy, significant species diversity (at least 12 native tree species per hectare, on average) and a system of natural vegetation buffers between agricultural land and bodies of water. The farms also use organic fertilizers.
Coffee in Mexico
Mexico is one of the largest exporters of certified Organic and Fairtrade coffees. Smallholders with less than 10 hectares compose a full 70% of Mexico’s coffee producers. Since the 1990s, producers have largely been successful at forming cooperatives that sell certified coffees and help them gain market access to garner higher prices.