Nestor Lasso – Colombia

This coffee comes from 24 year old producer Nestor Lasso and the El Diviso farm. The farm covers an 18 hectare area comprised of 15 ha of coffee and 2 ha of forest area. The farm carries great diversity of varietals. Nestor is using fully washed, semi washed and natural methods and uses parabolic dryers as well as raised African beds and some mechanical drying. 80,000 coffee trees grow here at a range of 1700-1850 metres.

Producer Nestor says, “We are the third generation that has been growing coffee. Our grandfather, José Uribe, was the founder of the farm El Diviso. With the work of all the family and constant savings we were able to build the infrastructure to process differentiated coffees; searching for better quality, both in coffee and our lives. After a long trial and error period we managed to standardise different processes, getting a better income in order to plant new varieties that allowed us to have better quality. One of our dreams is to produce specialty coffee that reaches all the world.”

Steps:

1)Floating process in order to select the best cherries only (fully ripe).

2) Anaerobic fermentation in cherry – closed cans during 40 hours at 16-18 Celsius.

The cherries are moved to a big tank for an oxidation process of 20 hours, where the leachates are collected so they can be used later on.

3) The coffee is pulped. 20 hour oxidation with mucilage in parchment

4) Submerged fermentation at 39 degrees Celsius for 12 hours, where the leachates collected previously are added to the coffee. During this phase the coffee is stirred once in a while so the liquids are a homogenous mixture. Note: the mucilage is not entirely removed during this phase.

5) Thermal shock: to finish the fermentation phase the coffee is washed with water at 65-70 degrees Celsius.

6) Drying phase: the coffee is moved to parabolic dryers for 18-24 days until 11% moisture is reached. During this phase the temperature never goes above 30 degrees Celsius.