Wbeimar Lasso,a Colombia Cup Tasters Champion, agro-industrial engineer, and a third-generation coffee grower from Narino, has been working on developing specialty coffees since 2006, focusing on coffee tasting, a task he deeply enjoys: "it feels unfair to get paid for tasting the best coffees in Colombia," he humorously remarks. In 2016, he founded Terra Coffee with his wife, Juliana, to train small producers to produce coffees for the specialty coffee market and improve their sustainability. In 2019, they acquired La Terraza farm, with 16 hectares of coffee and 10 hectares of nature reserve as a space where they can apply and share their knowledge for free, promoting coffee education and values such as family and youth development. The farm is truly a family effort, as Wbeimar and Juliana work alongside their two children, Samuel and Juliana, and Wbeimar's brother Segundo Aurelio who oversees the fieldwork. The farm currently holds organic certification and they are working towards a certification in regenerative agriculture. 

Wbeimar and Juliana believe that sustainability in coffee comes from collaboration among those through the entire supply chain, from producers, exporters, importers, roasters, and consumers. While Brandon was in Colombia last year, he had the privilege to hear Juliana discuss their work, their challenges, and their vision for the future of specialty coffee in Colombia during a producer panel discussion while attending Covoya Specialty Coffee Importer's Grow event. After hearing Juliana speak, and cupping one of Finca La Terraza's coffees while in Colombia we knew that we wanted to source from these incredible producers and farm! This coffee was imported specifically for Creation Coffee in collaboration with Finca La Terraza and Covoya.

More of Terra Coffee:

Terra Coffee SAS is a young producer group, established in 2016 by Wbeimar and Juliana, with a narrow focus on developing high quality coffees alongside select producers in the Huila and Nariño departments, and sharing them with the world. The small company manages one single producer association in each department where they work, “Ecoterra” in Nariño, with 140 producer partners, and “Terra Verde” in Huila, with 120.  

For Terra Coffee SAS as a whole, quality in coffee is very rationally understood as a direct pathway to well-being for volume-limited, small coffee farming families. Driving their business model is an understanding that quality results from small harvests have direct impacts on not just the farm owner, but the many dependents on each small farm, including young children, older adults, and the women of the household performing essential labor that often goes unpaid. By increasing quality and placing microlots in the market, Terra Coffee SAS plans not only to increase prices to growers and their families, but also increase their sense of pride in the details of their work.