Coffee has been part of Wilder Lazo’s family life for as long as he can remember. His father, Don Segundo Lazo, passed down years of knowledge—how to care for the land, how to grow coffee, and how to respect the work behind every harvest.

But Wilder didn’t follow the typical path. Instead of going straight into coffee, he became a veterinarian, and later earned a Master’s in Genetics. For a long time, he saw coffee as a hard crop with low rewards. Like many people who grew up around it, he mostly associated it with one thing: bitterness.

That changed in 2015, when Wilder travelled to El Salvador for work and found himself at Finca Los Pirineos, helping care for cattle owned by Don Gilberto Baraona, the producer and former owner of the farm. One day, after finishing work, Don Gilberto invited him for a coffee. Wilder politely declined. He didn’t really drink coffee, and he didn’t expect anything special from it.

Then something happened that stayed with him. Don Gilberto brewed a cup for himself, and as the coffee filled the air, Wilder
stopped. The aroma was completely different from what he thought coffee could smell like—sweet, clean, inviting. It caught his attention so much that he changed his mind and asked for a cup. That moment became a turning point: it was the best coffee Wilder had tasted up to
that point, and it opened his eyes to a new possibility—coffee could be beautiful, and it could be worth building a future around.

When Wilder returned to Colombia, he looked at his family’s coffee with new curiosity. He gathered seeds from their farms and sent them for genetic testing, wanting to understand exactly what they had. When the results came back, he realised something important: if he wanted to create truly exceptional cups, he needed to upgrade the genetic material on the farm.

Wilder stayed in touch with Don Gilberto and, through that relationship, secured seeds from Finca Los Pirineos—including the rare Maragogipe. And thanks to Don Gilberto’s support, Wilder also gained access to a small number of Geisha seeds from a renowned Hacienda in Panama.

Today, Wilder and his family grow authentically high-quality coffee at his fincas in San Adolfo, Huila, located between 1,450 and 2,000 masl. Their farms have the right conditions for growing high-quality coffee, which has made Wilder and his family a name known at the world’s best coffee roasteries today.