The Origin: Pitalito and the Heart of Huila

Pitalito is no ordinary coffee town. Located in the southern reaches of the Huila department, where the Central and Eastern branches of the Colombian Andes converge, it is widely regarded as one of the most important specialty coffee municipalities in the world. The city sits at approximately 1,318 metres above sea level, while the farms surrounding it climb considerably higher — many operating between 1,500 and 1,900 metres, where cooler temperatures slow cherry maturation and build the sugars and organic acids that define a complex cup.

Huila is Colombia's single largest coffee-producing department, responsible for roughly 18% of national output. Yet what sets Pitalito apart is not volume but focus. The region has earned a reputation — backed by numerous Cup of Excellence wins — for smallholder producers who invest deeply in post-harvest technique. Average farm sizes here are just 1.5 hectares, according to the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation, which means farmers must compete on quality rather than scale. That culture has made Pitalito a hotbed of fermentation experimentation and has drawn international exporters, roasters, and buyers to its farms year after year.

Huila's departmental coffee committee has invested substantially in training producers in fertilisation, processing, sensory analysis, and roasting — creating an unusually informed community of growers who understand what international specialty buyers are looking for and have the skills to deliver it.

Finca El Encanto and the Hoyos Family

Finca El Encanto in Pitalito is a family project in the truest sense. Built on the traditions of Colombian coffee cultivation, it was shaped by a collective effort across generations of the Hoyos family, all deeply rooted in the agricultural rhythms of Huila. Rather than staying in the conventional mold of commodity production, producer Franky Hoyos led the farm toward a thorough reinvention — renewing the crop mix with rare and exotic cultivars and embracing co-fermentation as the farm's central discipline.

The varieties planted at El Encanto today reflect that ambition directly. Alongside the classics, the farm now grows Geisha, Java, Ethiopian landrace types, Bourbon Aji, Caturro Chiroso, and Pink Bourbon — a portfolio that reads more like a specialty breeder's collection than a typical Huila smallholding. Franky studies each variety individually, adjusting fertilisation, harvest selection, and processing protocols to suit the specific genetic characteristics of each plant. His commitment extends into sensory analysis and roasting knowledge, giving the farm a self-sufficiency in quality control that is uncommon at this scale.

The partnership with Cata Export has been central to bringing El Encanto's experimental lots to international attention. Working closely with Franky and his family, Cata's team has helped develop and refine specific fermentation profiles for individual lots — including the Cream Donut — translating farm-level innovation into repeatable, internationally tradeable products with documented cup profiles.

The Exporter: Cata Export

Cata Export was founded by Cat and Pierre, two former UK baristas who transitioned into green coffee sourcing with a clear mission: to build traceable, relationship-driven supply chains between Colombian smallholders and European specialty roasters. The company operates exclusively in Colombia, working with a wide range of producers including youth-led projects and Afro-Colombian farming communities, with a particular focus on regions new to the specialty market.

Beyond brokering, Cata Export also became producers themselves — purchasing Cata Reserva, a 30-hectare farm in Timaná, Huila, of which half is maintained as natural forest reserve. This dual role as both exporter and producer gives Cata a ground-level understanding of what precision processing actually requires, and it informs how they collaborate with partner farms like El Encanto to develop specific fermentation protocols rather than simply purchasing finished lots.

"Cata Export sources, selects and exports Colombian specialty green coffee directly from the most remote farms to the best roasteries in Europe." — Cata Export / SCA Coffee Directory

The Varieties: Caturra and Chiroso

Caturra

Caturra is one of Colombia's most historically significant coffee varieties — a natural dwarf mutation of Bourbon, first identified in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais in the late 1930s and later widely adopted across Colombia for its high productivity and compact growth. It thrives at altitude, produces well-defined acidity, and provides a reliable structural backbone in the cup. For blended processing lots, pairing Caturra with a more aromatic variety like Chiroso creates complementary layers of sweetness and complexity.

Chiroso

Chiroso is one of the most fascinating genetic stories in contemporary specialty coffee. The variety takes its name from the elongated shape of its cherries, said to resemble either an achira (a traditional Colombian pastry) or a stretched shirt — "chiro" in local slang. It first gained attention in the Urrao region of Antioquia, and won national recognition in 2014 when a Chiroso lot took first place at Colombia's Cup of Excellence.

For years, Chiroso was classified as a mutation of Caturra. DNA fingerprinting by RD2 Vision has since overturned that assumption entirely, identifying the Chiroso genotype as a direct Ethiopian landrace — genetically distinct from Caturra and linked instead to the ancient wild coffee populations of East Africa. This has led many specialty buyers and roasters to refer to it informally as "Colombian Gesha," given its delicate, aromatic cup characteristics and the fact that it, like Gesha, traces back to Ethiopian genetic origins. The variety demands intensive care — up to four annual fertilisations — but rewards that investment with exceptional flavour potential: tea-like florality, bright acidity, and complexity that far exceeds its understated farm profile.

Chiroso was for many years found primarily in Antioquia. Its spread to Huila, including farms like El Encanto, is a sign of how quickly Colombian producers are chasing genetic potential wherever it leads.

The Process: Multi-Stage Fermentation with Yeast Inoculation

The Cream Donut lot is the direct result of collaboration between Franky Hoyos and Cata Export to develop a fermentation protocol that maximises sweetness, creamy texture, and fruit intensity while maintaining clean structure. The process is multi-stage, highly controlled, and notably more complex than conventional natural or washed methods.

1. Selective manual harvest — only cherries at peak ripeness are picked; under-ripe and overripe fruit are discarded during initial sorting.
2. 40 hours of hermetically sealed anaerobic fermentation — whole cherries ferment in closed tanks with no oxygen, building pressure and depth of flavour.
3. 30 hours of aerobic fermentation — tanks are opened to allow controlled oxidation, shifting the fermentation chemistry and adding complexity.
4. 36 hours of fermentation with added yeast — a selected yeast strain is introduced in a closed tank, directly shaping the final flavour profile toward sweetness and creaminess.
5. Thermal shock — rapid temperature change arrests fermentation at the desired point.
6. 5 days of sun drying on raised beds.
7. 20 hours of mechanical drying to reach target moisture content.
8. 10-day rest before threshing and export.

Yeast inoculation — the deliberate introduction of a selected yeast culture during fermentation — is one of the more contentious and creative techniques in contemporary specialty processing. The yeast strain chosen determines which flavour compounds are amplified. In the case of Cream Donut, the selection clearly targets sugars that produce lactic and vanilla-type esters — the compounds responsible for that distinct creamy, confectionery character. When paired with the already-aromatic Chiroso and the structural sweetness of Caturra, the result is a cup that is, genuinely, dessert in a glass.

The Roaster: DAK Coffee Roasters, Amsterdam

DAK Coffee Roasters was born from a rooftop moment in Amsterdam in 2019. Louis-Philippe Boucher — a former finance and venture capital professional from Montreal — was sitting on the roof of his home drinking coffee when the decision to start a roastery became clear. "Dak" means "roof" in Dutch; the name carries that origin story directly. He and his partner Veronique Lagarde, who brings a background in marketing, co-founded the roastery together after years of living across Montreal, Milan, London, and Amsterdam — cities whose contrasting coffee cultures sharpened their palates and sense of what specialty coffee could be.

DAK roasts on an IMF machine — a convection system that develops coffees in a shorter time while maintaining clean, bright, and sweet profiles. The roastery has grown from a two-person side project into a team of six, with wholesale clients across the UK, Ireland, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and beyond. Their identity is built around experimental coffees with deliberately evocative names — Candy Crush, Lychee Lassi, Cream Donut — that collapse the gap between cup description and marketing into a single word.

DAK's showroom and tasting room in Amsterdam was longlisted for the Dezeen Awards 2025, a recognition of the care they apply to the physical experience of coffee as much as the sensory one.

Huila's Experimental Processing Scene: The Broader Context

The Cream Donut is not an isolated product — it is a specific expression of a much wider movement reshaping Colombian coffee. Huila, and Pitalito in particular, has become a global epicentre of fermentation innovation, with producers, exporters, and agronomists collaborating to push the boundaries of what post-harvest processing can achieve.

In late 2023, the Specialty Coffee Association updated the World Barista Championship regulations to allow competitors to use co-fermented and yeast-inoculated coffees for the first time — provided any additional ingredients are introduced before the green coffee stage. The decision reflected how mainstream these techniques have become. Colombian coffees, with their concentration of technically skilled smallholders and exporter-producer collaborations like the one between El Encanto and Cata Export, have been central to that shift.

The result is a category of coffees that occupy a genuinely new space on the flavour map — not quite fruit-forward naturals, not quite classic washed Colombians, but something that uses microbiology as an instrument of flavour design with the same intentionality that a winemaker applies to a complex fermentation.

Brew Guide

The Cream Donut is available for both filter and espresso. Its light roast and dense fermentation-derived sweetness reward slightly different approaches depending on brew method.

Other Notable Lots from Finca El Encanto

Finca El Encanto produces a range of lots beyond Cream Donut, each exploiting a different variety or fermentation approach from the farm's growing portfolio. Other documented lots from the farm have included a Papayo variety processed via multi-stage washed fermentation — delivering blueberry, concord grape, and guava notes — and a Bourbon Aji co-fermented with strawberry and cacao in collaboration with Cata Export. The Pink Bourbon variety has also been produced as a standalone lot. Together these releases show a farm operating not as a volume producer but as a flavour research project, using its genetic diversity and Cata Export's processing knowledge to map the full sensory range of what Pitalito's terroir can produce.