Farm: El Diviso
Region: Pitalito, Huila
Variety: Chiroso
Process: Hydro Honey
Altitude: 1750 masl
Harvested: 2025
Cupping notes: Orange, floral, peach, apple candy, mint. Sweet and complex.
This coffee comes from Finca El Diviso, a project led by a new generation of producers in Huila. Five years ago, brothers Nestor and Adrian Lasso took over their family farm and chose a different path from traditional coffee production, focusing instead on specialty coffee and controlled experimentation. Together with Jhoan Vergara, they formed El Diviso: a collaboration between two family farms, united by a shared goal of pushing quality and consistency to a competition level.
Alongside this, a close partnership with CATA Export allowed the development of highly structured fermentation protocols, refined through years of trial, analysis, and adjustment. While resource-intensive, this work has resulted in coffees that are now regularly used on the competition stage. El Diviso lots have been used to win national championships, including the Polish Barista Championship, the U.S. Barista Championship, and the Irish and Italian Brewers Cup, as well as achieving podium finishes at the Austrian Brewers Cups. At the world level, El Diviso coffees have appeared on the World Barista Championship stage, including a 3rd place finish in 2023 and a finalist appearance in 2024. These results reflect the level of process control, consistency, and precision behind El Diviso’s competition lots, which are produced in extremely limited quantities and intended specifically for high-level performance.
This Chiroso Hydro Honey is a true competition lot, produced in very small quantities with extreme attention at every stage - from selective harvesting and cherry preparation to fermentation and drying. It reflects both technical precision and a broader shift in Colombian coffee, where young producers are choosing to stay in coffee, invest in knowledge, and build long-term value through quality rather than volume.
Process.
Cherries are selectively harvested and carefully sorted, retaining only the healthiest and densest fruit. After an initial cold-water flotation and controlled disinfection, the cherries undergo a first anaerobic fermentation in sealed bags, followed by a controlled oxidation phase in open tanks. The coffee is then transferred to specialised fermentation equipment that allows precise control over temperature and pressure, before entering a second anaerobic phase.
A portion of the cherries is submerged in warm water with the addition of a leachate from a longer fermentation of the same varietal, contributing to process consistency. The coffee then undergoes a thermal shock, moving from hot to cold water, before gradual dehydration. Final drying takes place in custom-built stainless-steel drying rooms developed by El Diviso, where drying curves are recorded and replicated to ensure stability, precision, and repeatability.
Transparency.
What we paid:
-Coffee: 85€/Kg
-Shipping: 1.25€/Kg
-Packaging, labelling and sorting: 2€
Quantity bought: 12 Kg
