El Triunfo Decaf, Colombia

El Triunfo is the lifelong dream of Jose Uribe Lasso, who aspired to one day own his own coffee farm. Jose is the original owner of El Diviso in Colombia, father of renowned producers Nestor and Adrian Lasso. While El Diviso is one of the competitive coffee world’s most celebrated names, it started from humble beginnings. Jose moved to Huila in the early 2000s to start a new life and escape civil conflict from his home in Nariño. He purchased an unassuming farm, Finca El Diviso, and with such fertile land, he stayed true to his belief that perseverance and the will to work can overcome poverty through his crops.

After saving for many years from working in coffee, he was able to purchase his own farm. While it wasn’t the biggest, it was one he could finally call his own. The farm was named ‘El Triunfo’, or ‘The Triumph’ in English, to commemorate the hard work that led to this achievement. After passing down plots of land in El Diviso to his sons so they could pursue production, little did he know that in the years to come they would become significant pioneers who would change the future and landscape of the Colombian coffee industry.

Together with his sons, Jose cultivates unique varieties on El Triunfo including Geisha, Pink Bourbon, and Bourbon Aji. With their experience in innovations in cultivation, processing, and QC, Jose has improved the overall quality of his crops with the help of his sons. Now Nestor and Adrian have expanded their land and decided to name their new farm El Triunfo in honour of their father’s farm and his efforts.

After the coffee cherries are harvested, they first undergo flotation to sort the cherries and remove foreign matter. The densest and ripest cherries that sink during flotation are prioritised as higher quality, and undergo anaerobic fermentation in plastic tanks for 32 hours at an average temperature of 16 to 18 Celsius. The cherries are then moved to hoppers for a 24-hour oxidation before being depulped and oxidised again for 40 hours. They are immediately submerged in coffee cherry mosto—the enzymatic fruit juices expelled from the fruit during fermentation—for 80 hours. They then enter a washing stage and a decaffeination process using Ethyl Acetate, a natural derivative of sugarcane, before being placed on raised drying beds for 18–20 days.