Ceiba Decaf

Ceiba is Ally's Core Coffee from Guatemala, named for the country's national tree. It is a community lot drawn from close to 2,000 smallholder producers across Huehuetenango, most of them farming around a fifth of a hectare with a few hundred trees. Ally's sourcing partner is Unitrade, which works directly with these communities through agronomy training and its Coffee Care NGO covering education, nutrition, and health. Huehuetenango is still rebuilding from the coffee leaf rust epidemic, and that support has kept family farms in operation. Ripe cherry is collected daily at a centralized wet mill, then depulped, washed, and dried in large batches for uniformity and cleanliness.

This lot is decaffeinated using methylene chloride, also called the MC or KVW method. Green coffee is steamed first so the bean structure opens and caffeine moves toward the surface. The solvent is then introduced and bonds selectively to caffeine molecules, carrying them out of the bean while leaving most flavor compounds in place. The process removes roughly 96 to 97 percent of the caffeine. The beans are steamed a second time to strip residual solvent, then dried back to stable moisture. Methylene chloride evaporates at 104F, far below the 350 to 425F range of a roast. The FDA caps residue in finished coffee at 10 parts per million, and commercial lots typically test well under 1 ppm.

Ally QC has not evaluated this decaf lot. The tasting notes above carry over from non-decaf Ceiba, which averaged 83.5. Cup the decaf in house and confirm before these notes reach a label or a PDP.