Colombia - El Vergel Estate Watermelon Candy Blast

El Vergel didn’t begin with coffee. It began with Martha Bayer, her husband, and avocado trees in Fresno, Tolima. In 2005, when pestilence disrupted their harvest and threatened the farm’s future, Martha introduced coffee as a way to diversify crops and steady the land.

The experiment demanded constant growth and learning — and it paid off. Today, El Vergel is known as one of the oldest single-estate farms in the region. While Martha has since stepped back, her sons, Elias and Shady Bayter, carry the farm forward with the same daring spirit that shaped the estate.

At El Vergel, processing is approached as an evolving, experimental practice, which they call “The New Way of Coffee.” The Bayter brothers’ methods pair naturally with the nutrient-rich soils of Black Mountain, the inactive volcano where the estate sits.

All their coffee trees, grown at 1,500 masl, yield dense, expressive cherries. Once fully mature, the cherries are hand harvested by tenured pickers who know the land intimately.

This balance of innovation and responsibility earned El Vergel the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros’s “Rainforest” certification between 2014 and 2015, which recognizes that the farm supports the environmental, social, and economic pillars of sustainability.

The Bayter brothers blend tradition and innovation, so that even all coffees — even decaffeinated ones — become cups worthy of celebration. At El Vergel, they keep with Colombian farming methods and cultivate over 28 coffee varieties in different small plots, with distinct microclimates to precisely grow each lot.

For their decaf, the brothers applied Sugar Cane Ethyl Acetate processing, or “natural decaf” to their Caturra. They sourced their ethyl acetate from Colombian fermented sugarcane molasses, grounding this experiment in their locale. The process is gentle: exposing green coffee to water then steam, so beans expand by absorbing moisture. This opens the cellular structure allowing the ethyl acetate to naturally dissolve caffeine.

This same spirit of dedicated refinement has led to El Vergel’s evolution. In 2018, the brothers modernized the farm and introduced aerobic and anaerobic processing.

Since then, they’ve developed research on yeast and bacteria to guide fermentation with care. It’s work that led to their development of Colombia’s first Koji fermentation process — a milestone that redefined what green coffee could become.