There is a long-standing assumption in coffee that decaf means compromise. Finca Los Nogales has spent years dismantling that idea — and in March 2024, they made it impossible to ignore.
At the 2024 US Brewers Cup finals in California, Weihong Zhang of BlendIn Coffee Club placed first using a decaffeinated Typica from Finca Los Nogales in Colombia — the first time in history a decaf coffee had won the competition. He described it as the best decaf he had ever tasted. What he didn't know when he first tried it was that it was a decaf at all.
The farm behind it has been building to this moment for over seventy years. Around eighty years ago, Ricardo Hernández and Concepción Castillo settled in Pitalito, Huila, with the ambition of making coffee history. Their son Ricaurte led the farm to 1st place in Colombia's inaugural Cup of Excellence in 2005 — an achievement that put the entire region of Bruselas on the specialty coffee map. Ricaurte's life was tragically cut short in 2013. His youngest son Oscar Fernando, a former naval officer, chose to honour his father's legacy by returning to the farm.
But this is not just Oscar's coffee. It is his sister Angie's too.
Angie Hernández studied industrial engineering and brought that scientific precision to the family farm. She oversees the fermentation process at a microbiological level — controlling, testing, and refining every stage with the kind of rigour that most farms simply don't have. The result is an on-farm decaffeination process unlike anything else in specialty coffee: the Mucilage EA Decaf. After the cherries are depulped, the green beans are soaked in their own fermented mucilage — not sugar cane, not outside solvents, but the coffee's own fruit — combined with ethyl acetate over 96 hours with a mosto-starter. The caffeine is drawn out gently. The complexity stays entirely intact.
Two siblings. One scientist, one steward. Three generations of family history behind every bag.
The cup: strawberry, bubblegum, lavender, sour cherry, dried plum, high molasses sweetness and a vivid malic acidity. Roughly 95% of the caffeine removed. None of the character.
Roasted in small batches in Adelaide by Auro. Brew it any time of day — that's entirely the point.
There is a long-standing assumption in coffee that decaf means compromise. Finca Los Nogales has spent years dismantling that idea — and in March 2024, they made it impossible to ignore.
At the 2024 US Brewers Cup finals in California, Weihong Zhang of BlendIn Coffee Club placed first using a decaffeinated Typica from Finca Los Nogales in Colombia — the first time in history a decaf coffee had won the competition. He described it as the best decaf he had ever tasted. What he didn't know when he first tried it was that it was a decaf at all.
The farm behind it has been building to this moment for over seventy years. Around eighty years ago, Ricardo Hernández and Concepción Castillo settled in Pitalito, Huila, with the ambition of making coffee history. Their son Ricaurte led the farm to 1st place in Colombia's inaugural Cup of Excellence in 2005 — an achievement that put the entire region of Bruselas on the specialty coffee map. Ricaurte's life was tragically cut short in 2013. His youngest son Oscar Fernando, a former naval officer, chose to honour his father's legacy by returning to the farm.
But this is not just Oscar's coffee. It is his sister Angie's too.
Angie Hernández studied industrial engineering and brought that scientific precision to the family farm. She oversees the fermentation process at a microbiological level — controlling, testing, and refining every stage with the kind of rigour that most farms simply don't have. The result is an on-farm decaffeination process unlike anything else in specialty coffee: the Mucilage EA Decaf. After the cherries are depulped, the green beans are soaked in their own fermented mucilage — not sugar cane, not outside solvents, but the coffee's own fruit — combined with ethyl acetate over 96 hours with a mosto-starter. The caffeine is drawn out gently. The complexity stays entirely intact.
Two siblings. One scientist, one steward. Three generations of family history behind every bag.
The cup: strawberry, bubblegum, lavender, sour cherry, dried plum, high molasses sweetness and a vivid malic acidity. Roughly 95% of the caffeine removed. None of the character.
Roasted in small batches in Adelaide by Auro. Brew it any time of day — that's entirely the point.
