Nestor Lasso is a young innovative coffee farmer whose name is becoming well known due to the family's quality efforts on their farm; El Diviso in Huila, Colombia. Nestor has a Technical Degree in Specialty Coffee Processing from SENA and has helped make many coffee champions with his coffee winning World Brewers and World Barista Champion since 2022.
5 years ago, Nestor and his brother Adrian took over the family farm and branched out into specialty coffee and experimentation rather than growing coffee like their parents. Today, at 22 and 24, the two brothers have teamed up with Jhoan Vergara, also the child of a coffee farmer, to create El Diviso. El Diviso brings together the two-family farms, El Diviso (Nestor and Adrian Lasso) and Las Flores (Jhoan Vergara), close to the town of Pitalito, in the Huila region of Colombia. This partnership was great as these 3 young guys united their knowledge to improve quality.
Then, 3 years ago, Cat & Pierre, founders of CATA Export and the 3 producers started a journey of trial and error to define the fermentation processes and protocols at the farm, with the aim to link these coffees directly to the global coffee market. This learning process has been time and money consuming but with an exciting outcome as today these coffees have been used in many barista competitions across the world!
Ripe only cherry is manually selected which are oxidized for 18 hours at an average room temperature of 25°C. The anaerobic fermentation stage is conducted in bags or containers for 20 hours at an average temperature of 16 and 18°C. Cherry is transferred to tanks, carrying out oxidation for another 28 hours, allowing it to reach a maximum temperature of 36°C. Lastly the cherry coffee is placed in 50-kilogram bags to start anaerobic fermentation for 16 hours at a temperature of 16 to 20°C then transferred to tanks, submerging them in 45°C water, adding leachate (coffee pulp juice) from the previous harvest and conducting leachate recirculation for 18 hours. Cherry is then depulped and dried in marquees at a maximum temperature of 32°C until reaching 11% moisture.
