Beyond El Diviso: The Peñas Blancas Project

Nestor Lasso and Jhoan Vergara are best known internationally as the co-founders of the El Diviso project — the farm partnership near Pitalito that produced the Sidra lot that won the 2022 World Barista Championship and the Ombligon that placed third in 2023. But their ambitions extend beyond their own farms. The Peñas Blancas Coffee Processing Centre in Acevedo, Huila, represents the next stage of their mission: a centralised processing hub designed to give local smallholder farmers access to the same world-class fermentation techniques, quality control infrastructure, and export connections that have made El Diviso a global name.

Peñas Blancas is more than a commercial operation. It is an explicit social project, built on the conviction that the economic benefits of specialty coffee should not be limited to farmers who already have the resources to invest in premium processing equipment. By bringing smallholders' cherries to a shared facility where Nestor's expertise in experimental fermentation and Jhoan's farm management knowledge are both available, Peñas Blancas lowers the entry barrier to specialty markets for producers who previously had limited options.

Jhoan Vergara: The Other Half of the Partnership

While Nestor Lasso (covered in depth in Blogs #3 and #4) has received significant international attention, Jhoan Vergara is an equally skilled and equally innovative producer whose contributions to the El Diviso and Peñas Blancas projects are inseparable from their success. Jhoan grew up in a coffee farming family that migrated from Cundinamarca to Huila in the early 1990s — his grandparents were coffee producers in the north, and coffee farming was the family's inherited knowledge. At age 15, Jhoan left school in Pitalito and began focusing on the family farm and on coffee.

His curiosity about where coffee went — who was buying it, what was being done with it — led him to SENA, Colombia's national vocational training service, where he met Nestor Lasso and the partnership that would define both their careers was formed. Jhoan runs Finca Las Flores in San Isidro, Huila, growing Java, Bourbon Aji, Chiroso, and other rare varieties with the same precision fermentation protocols developed through the Cata Export collaboration.

"Nestor Lasso and Jhoan Vergara hope to help other farmers and producers see that coffee is a much more noble product than perhaps it seems." — Black & White Coffee Roasters

The Process: Multi-Stage at Peñas Blancas

The Star Fruit lot processed through Peñas Blancas follows the multi-stage fermentation protocol that Nestor and Jhoan have refined through years of work with Cata Export. The exact steps vary by lot and variety, but the core sequence is consistent with the El Diviso approach.

1. Selective manual harvest at peak ripeness. Cherries measured for Brix (24–26°) before acceptance at the centre.
2. Cherry disinfection and floating to remove low-density defects.
3. 48 hours of whole-cherry oxidation in open tanks at a controlled temperature of no more than 25°C.
4. Thermal shock: cherries rinsed with hot water (50°C) to begin the thermal shock process that arrests certain microbial activity and enhances aromatic fixation.
5. Depulping and transfer to sealed plastic bags or anaerobic tanks.
6. Anaerobic fermentation for 36–48 hours with yeast addition. Fermentation monitored for pH and Brix.
7. Mechanical drying at the dehumidifying facility to approximately 10.5% moisture content.

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