Gallery Decaf coffee: El Carmen, Colombia 250g

250g of our Gallery Decaf coffee, in your choice of grind or whole beans, direct from our Coffee by Tate Roastery at Tate Britain.

Coffee by Tate is a vibrant community-led non-profit business that helps fund Tate Gallery and champion coffee producers and professionals of all genders throughout the coffee value chain. Our range of coffees is comprised of individual, community and family producers and designed to reflect the seasonality, diversity and quality of coffee grown across Africa and Latin America. Our range of Espresso, Filter and decaffeinated coffees are the results of projects, relationships or initiatives that we have instigated or supported in producing communities, with the help of our partners, and changes seasonally. This is a more sustainable process that ensures the highest quality yield and allows us to work with more producers.

This season's Gallery Decaf is El Carmen, a clean and complex washed process decaf coffee from the Red Association network in Colombia. It's recommended for espresso, but we've found it also tastes great as a stove top or French press ,with or without milk.

Flavour notes: Cherry, orange and baker’s chocolate
Producers : Red El Carmen
Location : Pitalito, Huila
Process : Washed, sugarcane decaffeination
Variety : Caturra, Castillo
Size : 250g

This exceptional decaf coffee comes from the Red Association network in Colombia, which empowers coffee producers to achieve stable and sustainable prices for community coffee lots and create connections with the speciality coffee market.

The overall sugar cane decaffeination process preserves the flavour profile in the coffee whilst introducing a new level of character. The result is a clean cup profile with a jammy acidity.

Keep your coffee sealed in the bag and store in a cool dry place away from sunlight. Use within 3 months.

Tate Collective's Open Call invited 16-25 year olds to create artworks for our coffee labels. Each entry was inspired by Coffee by Tate's values of quality, community and gender equality. This label titled Mother and Daughter was designed by Brynn Hansen.

About our producers

Together with Red Associations, Raw Material are building the required infrastructure to re-enable drying by producers, while also including steps traditionally downstream of producers: sample analysis, roasting, Quality Control, and separation of lots by value based on quality. Paired with a fixed price payment system, these steps result in the wider spread of knowledge, and an average income per household increase of 2.5 times. Red El Carmen has grown steadily since its inception in 2017 and is about to be furnished with a QC and cupping lab alongside the Association’s drying facilities.

About sugar cane decaffeination

Sugar cane decaffeination is often termed as a natural process decaf. Ethyl Acetate is an organically existing compound (C4H8O2) and a by-product found most commonly in the fermentation of fruits (it’s present in both ripe bananas and beer, for example). The plant Raw Material work with in Colombia uses water from the Navado el Ruis (a volcano between Caldas and Tolima) and natural ethyl acetate from fermented sugarcane, sourced in the southern region of Palmira. This process begins with steaming the coffee, increasing its porosity, which begins the hydrolysis of caffeine, which is usually bonded to salts and chlorogenic acid in the bean. The beans are then submerged in an ethyl acetate solvent, until 97% of the caffeine is removed. A final steam is then used to lift residual traces of the compound.

• Size 250 g