Finca El Diviso, Colombia (Washed Geisha) Specialty Coffee

5 years ago, Nestor Lasso 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 UK 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 Europe. Recently winning 1st place at Brewers Cup in Ireland and 3rd in Austria.
Nestor’s and Cat’s friendship is a good example of what Cata Export do, working directly from the farms is a very enriching process for them not only for the complexity of topics such as agronomy but also for the relationships Cata builds which ultimately translates into an economic benefit for Cata’s community, in this way many more young producers like Nestor have stayed in coffee and have had the chance to build a career.

 

 

 

 

 

Arabica Variety Geisha (Gesha)
 

This variety was originally collected from coffee forests in Ethiopia in the 1930s. From there, it was sent to the Lyamungu research station in Tanzania, and then brought to Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) in Central America in the 1953, where it was logged as accession T2722. It was distributed throughout Panama via CATIE in the 1960s after it had been recognized for tolerance to coffee leaf rust. However, the plant's branches were brittle and not favored by farmers, so it was not widely planted. The coffee came to prominence in 2005 when the Peterson family of Boquete, Panama, entered it into the "Best of Panama" competition and auction. It received exceptionally high marks and broke the then-record for green coffee auction prices, selling for over $20/pound. There is significant confusion about Geisha because there are multiple genetically distinct plant types that have been referred to as Geisha, many of which share similar geographic origins in Ethiopia. The spellings Geisha and Gesha are often used interchangeably, relating to the fact that there is no set translation from the dialects of Ethiopia to English. The coffee was first recorded in germplasm records with the spelling “Geisha”, and coffee researchers and germplasm banks have mostly maintained that spelling over many decades, leading that spelling to be promoted and used first in the coffee industry. The coffee was originally collected in Ethiopia in a region close to a mountain whose name is most commonly rendered in English as Gesha. Consequently, many in the coffee industry have preferred to rescue that spelling.