This is our first Mexican decaf in quite a number of years and once again we have looked to Chiapas, the country's most famous coffee region, to find this sweet and biscuit-y coffee.

This coffee hails from the Santa Fé farm in Motozintla. This is very close to the Guatemalan border and this area actually used to be Guatemalan territory until 1824. The farm itself is almost as old, dating back to 1855. It belongs to the Muguira family and is farmed by Jorge Arreola Nava. He is a cousin of Demetrio Arandia Muguira, founder of the Mexican decaffeination factory Descamex and innovator of the Mountain Water Process.

The decaffeination process Mountain Water is strikingly similar to that of many coffees we have stocked recently using the Swiss Water Process. With the Mountain Water process, the coffee is soaked in water with dissolved coffee compounds in it, with the exception of caffeine which can be filtered out. This causes the soaked beans to diffuse their caffeine into this solution to equalise the caffeine level with no concurrent equalisation produced for other compounds including flavour compounds. The decaffeinated coffee can thus largely retain its flavour the use of any chemicals not found in coffee.

Sip n' sleep...