Néstor Lasso and his family have become world-renowned coffee producers. The coffees produced at Finca El Diviso have become regular features on the WBC podium in recent years, and have slayed in too many national competitions to list.We're chuffed to be working with Cata Export to bring you coffees from these guys.
This coffee tastes almost indescribably sweet. The closest we can get to putting our finger on it is “Blue Wagon Wheels & Jaffa Cakes”... like sugary cheap chocolate with jam and marshmallow.
Honestly, this variety is a new one for me; to my knowledge, I've never tried Typica Mejorado. Apparently it's not even Typica-derived... yup, you guessed it, it's thought to be an Ethiopian landrace X Bourbon mutation bred somewhere in Ecuador... but that's unverifiable... what I do know a lot about is the processing.
Processing
1. Selective picking - only fully ripe Typica Mejorado cherries are harvested.
2. 24 hours oxidation - whole cherries undergo a controlled pre-fermentation oxidation.
3. 48 hours anaerobic fermentation - cherries are transferred into sealed tanks.
4. 48 hours secondary anaerobic fermentation - moved into fermentation bags for another two days.
5. Thermal conditioning - gentle temperature manipulation to stabilise microbial activity and preserve aromatic precursors.
6. 15–20 days slow sun drying - dried on raised beds and turned regularly.
7. Resting & stabilisation - rested until the coffee reaches 10–11% moisture, before milling and export.
El Diviso - The context
El Diviso is a family farm in Normandía, close to Bruselas in southern Huila. It was established almost thirty years ago by José Uribe and Marta Cecilia, beginning with a small piece of land and gradually expanding over time.
Their sons Jonathan, Adrián and Néstor grew up around coffee, coming home from school to help their parents pick, wash and move it.
“Coffee is literally our life,” Adrián says. “We grew up surrounded by coffee crops.”
For most of its history El Diviso was a fairly conventional Colombian coffee farm, producing the varieties commonly grown around Pitalito. Around ten years ago, that began to change.
Néstor decided to push things forward with speciality.
He became interested in different varieties and processing methods, encouraging the family to see El Diviso, in Jonathan's words, “in a different way, with an entrepreneurial vision.”
It turns out that was quite difficult.
El Diviso - A challenging transition
The modern version of the El Diviso story can sound a bit too polished.
Young Colombian producer experiments with fermentation. Young Colombian producer creates incredible coffee. Incredible coffee wins competition.
It’s the classic release-pack preamble to an expensive, mental coffee. It’s not wrong, but it does skip over quite a lot of the struggle.
Jonathan's version is much better.
He describes what followed as basically “starting from zero and learning.”
When the family first planted more unusual varieties, they assumed they could grow them much like the coffees they already knew. They quickly discovered differences in disease, fertilisation and agronomy.
Processing was a different beast altogether.
“We had no idea what a fermentation process was,” Jonathan remembers.
They started experimenting anyway, mostly through trial and error. Néstor has also been pretty open about the fact that they weren't figuring everything out alone, expressing gratitude for other producers who shared knowledge with them at the beginning of their journey.
It wasn't long before they made a killer coffee. People loved it; it sold well, and buyers wanted more. Unfortunately, nobody had written down exactly what they'd done - this sounds so painfully familiar; I swear almost every great thing I do is unrepeatable.
“No matter how much we've tried, even to this day, we've never managed to get that coffee again.”
That mistake changed things.
If processing was genuinely going to add value to their coffee, getting lucky wasn't enough. They needed to understand what they were doing and be able to repeat it.
For about a year they worked on standardising a fermentation profile. They messed up plenty of batches along the way: over-oxidised lots, overly fruity coffees, damaged beans and coffee that had to be sold for less because the experiment hadn't worked.
At points they nearly gave up. Then they nailed a fermentation profile they could repeat.
Moving on to natural processing basically meant starting all over again. But through a period of intense, but structured, experimentation they nailed the fermentation profile for a natural Sidra. This is the coffee that started to kick things off for the family.
Sidra is such a west choice of variety for a producer starting out. People still argue about where it actually comes from, it’s notoriously tricky to grow, and at the time the Lassos were still working out how differently these new varieties needed to be treated. Anyway, Sidra responded extraordinarily well to their processing, and it started slaying on cupping tables.
People wanted to know more about it, they were able to repeat it, the project was starting to come to fruition. That Sidra helped put El Diviso on the international map.
Then, in 2022, Anthony Douglas won the World Barista Championship with it.
El Diviso - Today
Despite the name most commonly written on bags of its coffee, El Diviso isn't really Néstor Lasso. It's a family thing.
The farm is now around 21 hectares, which is a pretty big plot for Pitalito. Néstor remains closely associated with its processing and experimentation; Adrián works in quality control, roasting and analysing coffees after processing; Jonathan works across the wider farm and business. Behind them are their parents and a much larger team involved in picking, processing, drying, milling and selling the coffee.
It’s funny considering the Néstor hype, because the work at El Diviso seems much more collaborative than the name on the bag might suggest. Still, give the credit where it’s due: even his brothers acknowledge that it was Néstor pushing things forward to begin with.
Today they grow a mad selection of varieties and run them through an equally wild set of processes. What started out as trial and error has developed into a much more controlled system, playing with fermentation time, oxygen, temperature and drying, then roasting and cupping the results themselves to work out what actually worked.
The fermentation protocols from El Diviso aren’t the most over-engineered, contrived processes we see in Colombian coffee, but they’re up there. You’re talking advanced naturals with thermal manipulation, yeast inoculations, mosto boosts, basically coffee being messed about with for several days before entering the drying phase. It’s wicked, and they don’t seem to be pushing any co-ferment nonsense at the moment either.
Somewhere along the way the project also became bigger than the family. They began working closely with Jhoan Vergara of Finca Las Flores, sharing ideas and developing processes together, while their relationship with Cata Export helped bring the results to a lucrative market on the other side. El Diviso itself, though, remains very much the Lasso family farm.
El Diviso - Impact
A bit of context is probably important here. While Pitalito is one of Colombia’s great coffee-producing regions, that prestige doesn’t necessarily translate into wealth for the people growing it. Plenty of small producers around Bruselas are still trying to make a living from coffee on tight margins, and suddenly pivoting to hype varieties isn’t something many traditional producers can easily do, nor would it necessarily work if they could.
Pitalito is one of the best places in the world for coffee, but that doesn’t make it affluent. Poverty and insecurity are still realities for plenty of people there, in a way that can be easy to overlook when we talk about the region from the comfort of a European coffee shop.
While we are effectively supporting one family who are already at the top of their game here, there are indications that some of their success is spreading into the local community too. El Diviso opens its facilities to young people and other producers around Bruselas, sharing the means and knowledge it took them years of frustration and investment to acquire. They also now process and dry coffees for neighbouring families.
We'd love to get our hands on those coffees.
We’ve been pretty critical of the speciality market’s obsession with “rockstar” producers in the past. Not because we don’t love the coffees, but because there are just so many people out there trying to make a living from coffee. When we do buy these hype coffees, I’m always interested in what’s happening on the farms around them. If your neighbour has similar growing conditions, and you can share some of the knowledge, infrastructure and market access that got your coffee onto the world stage, there’s every chance they can produce something fucking delicious too. We often find that a neighbour growing a higher-yielding, less hyped variety can offer a better value proposition for us, the drinker and, hopefully, the producer - particularly when some of the knowledge developed at the vanguard starts filtering down.
The Lasso family deserve the props. The experimentation and determination alone are pretty remarkable, and the coffees speak for themselves.
Rock on, mi familia!
