Specialty Coffee Wiki

Nestor Lasso

Properties3
descriptionThe young Colombian producer behind Finca El Diviso near Pitalito, Huila — a farm that went from family smallholding to competition-coffee supplier in about five years, on the back of tightly engineered fermentations.
tagsperson, producer, colombia, huila, competition, fermentation
aliasesNestor Lasso (producer), Nestor Lasso Colombia

12 min read

Nestor Lasso

Néstor Lasso is a Colombian coffee producer from Pitalito, in the department of Huila, who runs Finca El Diviso with his brother Adrian Lasso.12 He is a third-generation grower — his family has farmed the same ground for three generations — and he is unusually young for the profile he has, still in his twenties through the period all the published accounts describe.12

His name reaches most coffee drinkers indirectly. It appears in the small print of championship routines: the farm behind Anthony Douglas’s 2022 world title, and behind Jack Simpson’s 2023 third place. On this wiki he sits at the centre of a familiar problem — a producer whose coffees are documented in detail by the people selling them, and almost nowhere else.

The farm, and who is actually in it

FarmFinca El Diviso
WhereNear Pitalito, Huila, Colombia12
Altituderoughly 1,700–1,850 m, most often quoted as 1,750 m2345
Run byNéstor Lasso and Adrian Lasso, with Jhoan Vergara12
Known for[[Anaerobic fermentation

“El Diviso” now means two things at once, and it is worth separating them.

The farm is the Lasso family’s, founded by Néstor’s grandfather and taken over by the two brothers.2 The project is bigger: Néstor and Adrian joined forces with Jhoan Vergara, another producer’s son, merging El Diviso (the Lassos) and Las Flores (Vergara) into one operation.12 So a bag labelled “El Diviso, Nestor Lasso” may be describing the partnership rather than a single plot of land.

Both brothers took the family farm on about five years before January 2023 — so around 2018.12 Around three years into that, a green-coffee exporter called CATA Export partnered with them to work on fermentation protocols and to build direct routes into the UK market.12 That partnership is the hinge in the story: the point where a smallholding started producing lots designed for competition buyers.

To verify

The grandfather’s name — and who owns the farm at all. Slurp names the founder as José Uribe.2 That is one source, and it sits awkwardly against the ownership tangle already flagged on the Anthony Douglas note, where sources variously attribute El Diviso to Nestor Lasso, José Lasso (said to have held it since 1997), Luis Contreras and Luis Carlos Guzmán, and where one source places the farm in Quindío rather than Huila. The Huila–Pitalito location is now confirmed by two independent producer-facing accounts,12 but no land registry, cooperative record or farm-owned document was reachable, so treat the founding story and the ownership chain as reported, not established.

To verify

Bruselas. Black & White Coffee Roasters places the farm specifically in Bruselas, a rural district inside the Pitalito municipality.4 Only that one source says so, and its page returned HTTP 429 when fetched here. Pitalito is confirmed; the district is not.

How old is he, actually

This is a small question with a surprisingly bad answer, and it is a clean example of why undated marketing copy is a poor record.

SourceAges given for Néstor and Adrian
Standout Coffee, published January 202324 and 221
Black & White Coffee Roasters, undated23 and 254
Cog Coffee, undated26 and 275

To verify

His age and birth year are not establishable. Only the Standout piece carries a publication date, and even there the pairing of name to number (“Nestor and Adrian … 24 and 22”) is an ordering assumption, not an explicit statement.1 The other two pages are undated, so their numbers cannot be placed on a calendar at all, and the three sets do not reconcile. The honest statement is that he was in his early-to-mid twenties in the early 2020s. Do not quote a birth year.

What grows there

Slurp’s origin piece lists the farm’s varieties as Geisha, Sidra, Bourbon, Aji and Ombligón.2 Roaster listings add Pink Bourbon, Java, Caturra, Typica and Catuaí for washed lots.3

Two of those matter more than the rest here:

  • Ombligón — the variety that carries most of El Diviso’s competition reputation. It is described in the trade as a mutation of Caturra, named for the small navel-like dimple on the bean. The farm’s Ombligón is sold as an anaerobic natural, with cherries selected at 21–24° Brix — Brix being a sugar-concentration reading, so this is a way of saying only the ripest fruit goes in.3
  • Bourbon Aji — “Aji” (chilli) is a Colombian farm name for a distinct local Bourbon selection, not a registered variety.

To verify

There is no definitive variety list. Every list above comes from a roaster or importer describing a lot they had for sale, not from a nursery record or a formal variety inventory. Ombligón in particular has no entry in the World Coffee Research Arabica catalogue, so the “mutation of Caturra” description — which also appears in this wiki’s championship dataset on the Jack Simpson note — rests on trade consensus rather than genetic testing, exactly like Sidra.

The processing, which is the whole point

El Diviso’s reputation is not built on altitude or variety. It is built on fermentation control — treating the post-harvest stage as the place where flavour is manufactured rather than merely preserved. The general description given for the farm is anaerobic fermentation, thermal washing, prolonged maceration and slow drying.3

“Anaerobic” means sealed away from oxygen — cherries go into closed bags or tanks so that a different set of microbes takes over, pushing the cup toward intense, boozy, red-fruit flavours. Anaerobic fermentation covers the mechanism; Carbonic maceration covers the wine-borrowed variant.

Individual lots, as their buyers describe them:

LotProcess as describedDetail
Ombligón, anaerobic naturalSealed fermentation, then dried whole in the fruitCherries selected at 21–24° Brix; 2024–2025 harvest3
Gesha, washed anaerobicFloat-sort, then sealed fermentation40 hours at about 17 °C in bags or jars5
Bourbon Aji, “thermal shock”Two fermentations either side of pulping, finished with a hot-water wash24–32 h sealed fermentation → pulp → 6 h oxidation → mucilage reintroduced → 28–32 h second fermentation → hot-water wash → 16–25 days drying under canopy4

Thermal shock — washing the beans with hot and then cold water — is a Colombian competition-lot technique intended to halt fermentation sharply and lock in aromatics. The same term appears elsewhere in this wiki attached to Las Flores, the partner farm, on the Good Food Awards and Equator Coffees notes.

To verify

Every process figure above has exactly one source, and it is the seller. No producer document, exporter spec sheet or third-party audit of these protocols was reachable, and the Presta and Black & White pages returned HTTP 429 when fetched here. Hours, temperatures and Brix readings are as printed on retail listings. Treat them as the roaster’s account of the lot they bought, not as the farm’s published protocol.

Competition record

Two placings are recorded in this wiki’s imported championship dataset, which lists the competitor’s declared coffee for each routine:

YearChampionshipCompetitorResultCoffee declared from El Diviso
12022World Barista Championship, MelbourneAnthony Douglas1stHuila, Colombia — Sidra, anaerobic natural, 80-hour fermentation
22023World Barista Championship, AthensJack Simpson3rdHuila, Colombia, 1,700 m — Ombligón, natural, 72-hour fermentation in bioreactors with mosto and Saccharomyces yeast, then 60-hour oxidation

Both entries name “El Diviso, Nestor Lasso” as the farm. Read them alongside the caution on the Anthony Douglas note, which flags that no official championship technical sheet was publicly reachable to confirm the 2022 lot independently.

Beyond the world stage, both producer-facing accounts consulted report wins in Ireland and Austria — Standout specifies 1st place at a Brewers Cup in Ireland and 3rd in Austria.12

To verify

A roaster claim about 2024 that this wiki’s own record contradicts. Presta states that El Diviso coffees were used at the “2024 World Barista Championship in Chicago, where a lot of the Ombligón variety contributed to a 3rd place finish.”3 Two things are wrong with that as written: the 2024 World Barista Championship was held in Busan, South Korea, not Chicago, and the Ombligón-from-El-Diviso third place in this wiki’s dataset is 2023 in Athens, Jack Simpson’s. Simpson’s 2024 coffees are recorded as coming from Finca Deborah and Finca Zarza, not El Diviso. The likeliest explanation is a garbled retelling of the 2023 result, but do not repeat the 2024 Chicago claim in any form.

To verify

The Irish and Austrian titles have no names, years or governing-body records. Both sources name only the countries, and only one names an event type at all.12 No national coffee association result page was consulted, so there is no verifiable competition name, year, competitor or placing behind these.

To verify

Cup of Excellence 2019 and the Sprudgie nomination. Presta says El Diviso “has been featured in the Cup of Excellence Colombia North 2019 auction,” and that Néstor “has also been nominated as ‘Most Notable Producer’ in the Sprudgie Awards.”3 Both appear on that one retail page, which could not be fetched here. No Alliance for Coffee Excellence lot list, rank, score or auction price was found, and no Sprudge nomination list was consulted. Check allianceforcoffeeexcellence.org before repeating the Cup of Excellence claim.

To verify

No cupping scores and no auction prices exist for his coffees in this wiki. Not one of the eight roaster and importer pages behind this note publishes a numeric SCA score for an El Diviso lot, and none reports what a buyer paid at origin. The only money figure found anywhere is a retail one: Presta listing an Ombligón anaerobic natural at $25.00 with no bag weight shown, which cannot be converted to a price per kilo.3

Who buys him

The buyer list is the most solid part of the record, because each entry is a company putting its own name on a bag: Meron Coffee,6 Presta Coffee,3 Cog Coffee,5 Black & White Coffee Roasters,4 Standout Coffee,1 Slurp,2 Tanat Coffee,7 and Euphoria.8 That is Europe and North America, small-batch, competition-adjacent roasters — the segment that pays for process rather than for volume.

Why it matters

Néstor Lasso is what the modern competition supply chain looks like from the farm end. A hectare-scale Huila holding of the kind Huila is built from — the department’s average farm is about 1.5 hectares — became internationally recognisable in roughly five years, not by planting a famous variety but by learning to run fermentations precisely and selling that skill to buyers who compete.

That is a genuinely different route to a premium than the one Geisha and Best of Panama established, where the plant does the work and an auction sets the price. Here the value is in a protocol, and the protocol is portable — which is also why the farm’s flavour reputation ran so far ahead of its paperwork. There is no auction record, no score sheet and no producer website to check any of it against. What exists instead is a shelf of roaster copy, and this note is mostly an exercise in reading it carefully. That gap between reputation and record is the subject of Premiumisation.

  • (no official website found) — no site, exporter page or verified social account belonging to Néstor Lasso or Finca El Diviso was found in the search run for this note. Every page that describes the farm is a roaster or importer selling its coffee.

Footnotes

  1. Standout Coffee — About Nestor Lasso, subscription coffee of February — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the January 2023 publication date, the ages 24 and 22, the ~2018 takeover, the El Diviso + Las Flores / Jhoan Vergara merger, Pitalito in Huila, the CATA Export partnership and the Irish Brewers Cup 1st / Austrian 3rd claim ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13

  2. Slurp — Nestor Lasso — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the third-generation description, the grandfather José Uribe, Adrian Lasso, Huila–Pitalito at 1,750 masl, the variety list, the CATA Export collaboration and the Ireland/Austria wins ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15

  3. Presta Coffee — Colombia, Nestor Lasso, Ombligon, anaerobic natural — returned HTTP 429 when fetched here; cited via the research report behind this note. Source of the 1,700–1,850 m range, the 21–24° Brix selection, the 2024–2025 harvest, the $25.00 retail price, the washed-lot variety list, and the Cup of Excellence 2019, WBC 2024 Chicago and Sprudgie Awards claims ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  4. Black & White Coffee Roasters — Nestor Lasso Bourbon Aji — returned HTTP 429 when fetched here; cited via the research report. Source of the Bruselas location, 1,750 m, the ages 23 and 25, and the full thermal-shock process steps ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  5. Cog Coffee — Colombia Gesha Nestor Lasso, Huila — roaster product page; source of the 1,850 m Gesha lot, the 40-hour / 17 °C washed anaerobic protocol and the ages 26 and 27 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Meron — Colombia Nestor Lasso Ombligon anaerobic natural — roaster product page; source of the 1,750 m Ombligón lot ↩

  7. Tanat Coffee — Nestor Lasso Sidra natural — returned HTTP 404 when fetched here; cited via the research report for the “anaerobic fermentation, thermal washing, prolonged maceration, slow drying” description and the extended variety list ↩

  8. Euphoria — Nestor Lasso Ombligon — roaster product page; source of the 1,800 m Ombligón listing ↩

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