Bukonzo East Africa SWP Decaf FTO

Bukonzo Organic, located in the Rwenzori Mountains, has strong ties to the native Bakonzo tribe. They actively support farmers in overcoming environmental challenges through various initiatives. Teaching sustainable farming practices and techniques, such as shade growing and organic composting, is a key focus. The cooperative also invests in improving farmers' quality of life with energy-saving cookstoves, tree planting, and diversifying incomes through beekeeping.

Bukonzo Organic promotes environmental preservation and social development in the region. The cooperative is situated in the picturesque Rwenzori Mountains, providing glacier water and holding cultural significance for the Bakonzo tribe. The cooperative and tribe collaborate to advance organic farming practices and protect the natural beauty and mythology of the mountains.

The coffee undergoes washing and drying processes at 36 micro-washing stations. The drying process is carried out on raised beds with shade cover, ensuring optimal conditions for the coffee beans.

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.

Swiss Water 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.

SWP decaf composition varies from lot to lot, but SWP does provide traceability info. Please reach out to [email protected] if you need any help tracing your lot.

Sustainable Harvest® is a specialty coffee trader focusing primarily on bringing coffees to market that are sourced from smallholder farmer cooperatives in the supply chain such as indigenous communities, women groups and the next generation of coffee farmers.

Their sourcing model is built on transparency, traceability and direct relationships between quality-minded coff­ee roasters and best-in-class coffee producers. Sustainable Harvest® has an on-site presence at origin with staff­ in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Peru. Each office coordinates their supply including quality management, supplier relationships, source development, logistics, training and capacity building.