Colombia El Diviso Yellow Bourbon Yeast Natural

Tasting Note:  Floral | Yellow Plum | Clementine | Mango | Nectarine | Mint Choc

 Size:  200g/1kg

Brewing Recommendation: Filter Brews / Modern Espresso 

Yellow plum is the first thing you'll taste in this Colombian El Diviso Yellow Bourbon, produced by Nestor Lasso by steering the whole-cherry ferment with selected yeast, and the cup that comes back is clean, floral and stacked with yellow stone fruit.

The farm and producer

This lot comes from Finca El Diviso, near Pitalito in Huila, Colombia, farmed by Nestor Lasso with his brother Adrian and partner Jhoan Vergara. They're a young, third-generation Pitalito growing family, and their coffees have turned up in World Barista Championship routines, so the bar for what lands in the bag is high.

The varietal

Yellow Bourbon is a yellow-cherried form of Bourbon that first showed up in Brazil in the 1930s, the gold fruit coming from a recessive gene pair (basically Bourbon with the colour dial turned to amber). It's prized for sweetness, bright citric acidity and ripe stone-fruit notes, and it shows best above roughly 1,000 masl, which this 1,750-masl lot clears with room to spare.

How it's processed

Here's the nerdy bit. Instead of leaving the whole cherries to ferment on whatever wild microbes happen to be in the air (a standard natural), the cherries are inoculated with a selected yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae (T58), then held at around 35°C for about 80 hours at a 1:5 yeast-to-cherry ratio before drying. Think of it like using a sourdough starter instead of hoping the right bugs turn up: a known yeast steers the flavour and keeps batches consistent. The payoff is more clarity, higher acidity and more tropical, floral lift than a standard natural usually gives.

In the cup

Expect yellow plum up front, then clementine, mango and nectarine, all wrapped in florals with a cool mint-chocolate finish. The mango leans tropical in a way a Malaysian palate will clock straight away. It's coffee with character, and a tidy lesson in what a controlled ferment can do.

If your shelf is all the usual washed and natural lots, order a bag of this yeast-natural online and taste what a steered ferment does differently.