Inside Los Nogales: The Family Behind One of Huila’s Most Experimental Farms

Tucked into the misty hills of El Diamante, in the Bruselas district of Pitalito, Huila, Finca Los Nogales looks at first like a classic Andean coffee farm. Rows of trees march up steep slopes under native shade; clouds hang low over the valley; pickers move through the lots with plastic baskets at their hips. Look closer, and you find something else as well: a cupping lab with a ROEST and EK43, a microbiology laboratory, data on every lot, and a leadership team that talks as easily about pre-ferments and thermal shock as they do about soil and family.

Los Nogales is one of the most thoughtful, technically ambitious farms we work with at Glass. It is where a fifth generation of the Hernández family has turned inherited land and a painful history into a centre for research, fermentation and community-focused coffee production. Over the years we have bought coffees from several corners of their work: washed Typica designed by head cupper Aníbal Díaz, Cenicafé varieties developed and processed under the leadership of Angie Hernández, and multiple lots from Oscar Hernández, including Orange Bourbon and washed Typica. Their farm-made decaf is the best we have tasted, and their Bourbon Pimenta has taken awards on the international stage. Together, these coffees say a lot about how this farm thinks.

What follows is a profile of Los Nogales itself: the people behind it, the landscape they work in, and the systems they have built to push Colombian coffee forward.

Roots: The Legacy Of Ricaurte Hernández

The story of Los Nogales begins around 1952, when Ricardo Hernández and Concepción Castillo arrived from Nariño to the then newly forming district of Bruselas. They settled in fertile land above Pitalito that would later become El Diamante, planting the first coffee trees and raising eight children who grew up with coffee as both work and identity.

Among those children, the youngest son, Ricaurte, stands out in every version of the farm’s history. A farmer by profession and conviction, he believed that coffee could be more than a subsistence crop. He wanted a farm that was profitable, professional, and able to provide dignified employment and educational opportunities for the people around it.

In 2005, that vision broke through to the wider world. Colombia hosted its first Cup of Excellence competition and more than 280 lots were submitted. Los Nogales, under Ricaurte’s leadership, took first place. International judges ranked its coffee above every other entry, and the win became a reference point for Huila and for Colombia as a whole. As Oscar would later say, the result split the history of Colombian coffee in two: there was coffee before Los Nogales’ Cup of Excellence win, and coffee after.

Ricaurte did not stop at quality scores. He pushed for new ways of treating the soil, new models for marketing coffee, and different business structures that could give farmers more control. The seeds of today’s Los Nogales concept are already there in his approach: add value at the farm, build systems around education and employment, and treat innovation as a responsibility rather than a luxury.

Loss, Return And Reinvention

The next chapter is painful. In February 2013, while travelling to the farm, Ricaurte was killed by armed groups. It is a story that echoes across rural Colombia, where violence has often cut short lives and projects that were just beginning to bear fruit. The Hernández family considered selling the farm outright in the aftermath, both to protect their mother and to step back from a place filled with grief.

At that moment, the youngest son, Oscar Fernando, made a different decision. An industrial engineer and non-commissioned officer in the Colombian Navy, he left his military career and returned home to take over Los Nogales. For him, the best way to honour his father was to keep building: to treat the farm not only as a memory, but as a platform for change.

Oscar brought with him a mix of discipline, environmental training and systems thinking. Earlier studies in environmental management at SENA had sensitised him to sustainable production and the reuse of materials. In the Navy he had learned about logistics, leadership and structure. At Los Nogales, these threads come together. Under his guidance, the farm has shifted from a traditional estate to a research and innovation centre that focuses as much on process and technology as it does on yields.

The aim is explicit: build a company that is profitable, provides decent, well paid employment, and encourages people to keep studying. The farm becomes a vehicle both for quality coffee and for technology that can help revolutionise how coffee is produced and valued.

From Farm To Research Hub

Los Nogales today is a tight system of land, people, data and experiments.

By the numbers, the core farm covers roughly 22 hectares, with around 63,000 trees planted up to 2,100 metres above sea level, shaded by native species. Eighteen different varieties are under active production, including Geisha, Caturra, Colombia, Cenicafé selections, yellow and pink Bourbon, Tabi, Hava, Typica and the now famous Bourbon Pimenta.

Recently the family added a second property, Niebla, after searching for even higher altitudes and specific climatic conditions. Sitting up to about 2,150 metres above sea level, Niebla is being planted with varieties like Panama Geisha and Typica Mejorado, intended for the most exclusive and delicate coffees they produce. Controlling dry milling at the farm through a custom-built facility completes the loop, allowing them to manage every step from cherry to bag on site.

The physical layout, however, is only half of the story. The other half is infrastructure and roles.

  • A microbiology lab led by chemist Karen Carrillo focuses on identifying and cultivating microbial cultures for controlled ferments, ensuring sanitary standards and repeatability.
  • A cupping laboratory, headed by Aníbal Díaz, uses a ROEST sample roaster and Mahlkönig EK43 grinder to evaluate every lot and every experiment. Results are logged into Cropster and tied back to specific fermentation protocols, plots and varieties.
  • Drying is coordinated by Nelson Muñoz, who oversees multiple drying areas and ensures each batch hits the right moisture and water activity targets.

Every coffee passes through this system. Those that meet strict profile requirements are offered as distinct lots. Coffees that do not match their target profile but still have excellent cups are blended into a house Los Nogales blend, which many buyers use as a characterful alternative to generic regional coffees.

The overall concept could be summed up as “artisan at scale”: small lots, rustic hands-on work in the fields and drying patios, but supported by serious equipment, data and scientific thinking.

The People Behind The Processes

Los Nogales is, at its core, a family and a community project.

Oscar serves as CEO and overall vision holder, pushing the farm forward and keeping Ricaurte’s legacy present in strategic decisions. Angie Hernández, an industrial engineer, is Head of Operations and a leading voice in the microbiology and fermentation work. Her role in the lab has helped rethink how thermal shock, pre-ferments and long ferments can be used to build clean but expressive cups.

Aníbal Díaz, Head of Coffee, is responsible for the sensory side. He leads the cupping lab, defines cup profiles, and designs roasting curves that translate Los Nogales’ processing decisions into coherent flavour stories. Aníbal is also the one who evaluates the various research fermentations and, together with Oscar, decides which protocols are worth scaling.

Around them is a wider team that covers finance, creative work, plant management, information systems and more. Nancy Hernández oversees finance; Astrid leads creative; Liliana manages processing; Andres Felipe runs the information systems that underpin traceability. A group of more than 30 picking families forms the seasonal backbone of the farm. Every harvest, they are trained on ripeness standards, handling and basic sensory concepts, so they understand why selective picking matters.

Even the dogs are officially on the organisational chart: Atenea as Head of Security, Lucas as Welcome Ambassador, Bruno as assistant, and Toby as Walk Coordinator. It is playful, but it also says something about how the farm sees itself: not as a factory, but as a living, breathing community where everyone, including the animals, has a role.

Soil, Organic Matter And Microbiology

One of the most consistent threads in Los Nogales’ work is the focus on the soil. The family speaks about coffee plants as another member of the household, and that perspective shows up in how they fertilise and manage the land.

The process begins with careful seed selection and nursery management, followed by a balanced, mostly natural diet built around organic matter and microbiology. Pulp from processed cherries, prunings and other organic residues are transformed into compost and used as organic fertiliser. The goal is to feed soil life first, then plants, so that flavour and resilience follow.

Microbiology, in particular, is a key lever. Pre-ferments, often compared to sourdough starters, are built from native yeasts and bacteria isolated on the farm. These are then added to tanks during fermentation to steer flavour development and reduce the risk of unwanted microbes. In washed and honey processes, a combination of thermal shock and controlled fermentations helps open up sugars, pasteurise the surface of the beans, and create a clean environment for the desired microbes to work. The standard template for many of their lots includes:

  1. Strict selective picking of ripe cherries
  2. Cleaning and disinfection with treated water
  3. Density sorting in water to remove floaters
  4. Thermal shock, moving from hot water around 80°C to cold water around 15°C within minutes
  5. Pulping and the addition of sugars pressed from the fresh husks
  6. Around 120 hours of fermentation with pre-ferments
  7. Sun drying over approximately 15 days

This protocol appears in various forms across coffees overseen by Oscar, Angie and Aníbal, adjusted depending on variety and desired profile.

The result is a style of processing that is experimental but not chaotic. Fermentation is used to refine and highlight the farm’s raw material rather than to drown it out. For Los Nogales, modern processing is not about chasing extremes, but about achieving very specific, repeatable expressions.

Community, Employment And The Social Fabric

Beyond the cup, Los Nogales positions itself explicitly as a company with social responsibility. This is partly an inheritance from Ricaurte, who had served as president of the local community action board, and partly a response to the violence that took his life.

At any given harvest, more than 30 families are directly employed as pickers, sorters and processing staff. Training is a non negotiable: before the season starts, the team runs workshops on ripeness, defect identification and basic hygiene. The idea is to turn every worker into a quality partner, not just labour. The income from these jobs supports households across the Bruselas area, and the farm’s success is felt beyond the property line.

Within the family, education is strongly emphasised. Many of the siblings hold degrees in engineering, finance, chemistry or related fields, and they see their roles on the farm as a way of bringing those skills back to the countryside rather than leaving it behind. That same logic extends to the younger team members and lab assistants, who are encouraged to study and build careers without having to abandon their rural roots.

At a conceptual level, Los Nogales describes itself as a family business that treats customers and workers with the same values they apply at home, aiming to create positive, authentic experiences for everyone involved. That shows up in small details: transparent communication with buyers, willingness to share technical data, and hospitality for visitors who make the trip to El Diamante.

Glass x Los Nogales Relationship

For Glass, working with Los Nogales feels less like buying coffee from a supplier and more like connecting to an ongoing research lab in the hills of Huila.

Over the past seasons we have brought in coffees led by each of the key figures at the farm: Aníbal’s washed Typica, Oscar’s washed Orange Bourbon and Typica, Angie’s Cenicafé lots, their award winning farm-made decaf (probably the best we have ever tried), and their celebrated Bourbon Pimenta. The range alone says a lot about the depth of their work and the confidence they have in their own profiles.

Our founder, Carlo, first met Oscar when he visited London. That meeting, and the conversations that followed, confirmed what the cups already told us: Los Nogales is one of the most innovative farms in coffee when it comes to flavour profiles. Season after season, their coffees continue to impress our customers and reset our expectations of what Huila can deliver.

Across everything we have bought, what stands out is not just quality but intent. You can feel the through line from soil management to microbiology, from thermal shock tanks to Cropster records, and finally into the roaster. Every decision sits inside a bigger philosophy about how coffee should be grown, processed and experienced.

Why Finca Los Nogales matters

Los Nogales is a family farm that has navigated generational change, violence and shifting markets while still producing exceptional coffee on steep Andean slopes. In other ways, it looks like a prototype for what the next generation of Latin American coffee farms might become.

It is a place where:

  • agronomy, microbiology and sensory science are treated as everyday tools, not distant disciplines
  • processing is both experimental and repeatable
  • data and software sit alongside compost piles and shade trees
  • and a whole community of workers, neighbours and even dogs is woven into the identity of the farm

For us at Glass, Finca Los Nogales represents a version of coffee’s future worth paying attention to: one where innovation serves both flavour and people, where rigorous process does not erase the farm’s rustic character, and where a family is willing to keep questioning its own methods even after major recognition.

When we put coffees from Los Nogales on our bar, we are not just sharing another lot from Huila. We are sharing a point of view on what coffee can be when a farm refuses to accept that “this is just how it is done” and instead treats each season as a chance to refine, test and learn.

Finca Los Nogales shows that this kind of progress is not theoretical. It is already happening, tree by tree and tank by tank, on a hillside in El Diamante.