CONTINENT: South America
COUNTRY: Colombia
REGION: Huila
VARIETAL: Pink Bourbon
FARM: La Dinastía
FARMER: Wilder Lazo, Heiner Lasso
PROCESS: Anaerobic Red Honey
ALTITUDE: 1480-1,550 masl

This coffee makes a great classic pourover, but we encourage you to play around with different brew methods as this delivers a tasty cup with every method we’ve tested.

Wilder Lazo is actually a veterinarian specialized in livestock farming. However, as the coffee price continued to decline in 2016 and his father fell seriously ill, he decided to bring the family farm up to speed together with his brother.

Initially, their coffees scored between 80-83 points on the cupping scale, despite elaborate processes and preparations. Wilder started to examine soil samples and use targeted nutrients and fertilizers to neutralize the pH value, thereby increasing the availability of nutrients for the coffee trees. He refers to this as precision agriculture.

The brothers produce a variety of coffee varietals on their 18 hectare farm including Pink Bourbon and Marageisha.

The coffee cherries are harvested when fully ripe, and extremely large. They are then washed in water tanks to separate out the impurities and float the beans. Next, the cherries are depulped with the mucilage left intact and fermented anaerobically in blue fermentation tanks with water for 60 hours. After fermentation the coffee is dried with the mucilage intact for 12 days on raised beds as a Red Honey.

The anaerobic fermentation emphasizes the “true coffee character”, as most microorganisms work much slower compared to aerobic “fermentation”—more accurately referred to as “oxidation”, since fermentation, by definition, is an anaerobic process. In coffee processing though, everything that happens “between picking and drying” is mistakenly referred to as fermentation.