13 minute read This piece is inspired by curiosities surrounding Aviary’s release 004: Lino Rodriguez as well as upcoming releases 005 and 006. AVIARY#004: Lino Rodriguez, featured in the April 2024 edition of Food & Wine Magazine, is available for pre-order through the Aviary website. To place this piece in context of the coffees that inspired it or to support this blog and the work I do, please consider ordering. The way that climate change hit Huila, harvest expanded from a ten- or twelve-week symphony starting in August or September into staccato-pulses punctuated by silence runnin ..read more

10 minute read Day 1 of the Copa de Oro competition in Huila, Colombia in November 2023 hosted by Osito Coffee This piece is inspired by curiosities surrounding the process of sourcing Aviary’s release 003: Gildardo Lopez, as well as my history buying from the Cup of Excellence-winning producer of 004: Lino Rodriguez. Both of these coffees will be available for pre-order through the Aviary website. To place this piece in context of the coffees that inspired it or to support this blog and the work I do, please consider ordering them. Over the last eighteen months, I’ve spent considerable time ..read more

3 minute read A brief personal note: After a few restless months, my roasting project, Aviary, is live. I funded Aviary using a crowdfunding mechanism and without any outside investment (save an equipment loan through the Small Business Administration) with the intention of keeping the company unencumbered from financial influence or expectations of a return on investment. I keep overhead low; the only permanent staff member is me. This way, I have the freedom to roast and release not based on a predictable cadence or interval, but only when I come across a coffee I want to present. Since I b ..read more

15 minute read In the months since I published my post on sample roasters, I’ve heard from countless Roest users who shared my experience—and perhaps a few frustrations—and who hoped I’d be willing to shed a little more insight into best practices for getting optimal results from the roaster. Every coffee that comes through my lab is roasted first on the Roest; millions of dollars per year of purchasing decisions are made, in no small part, due to the quality of the roasts I am able to produce using the cube-shaped machine—as well as the speed, cleanliness and ease of its workflow. In an effo ..read more

45 minute read Most of the roasting I’ve done over the last decade has been spent fussing over tiny increments of coffee, applying whispers of heat and air as precisely as possible to achieve an acceptable roast to use for defect detection in and quality assessment of green coffee.  I’ve measured my life in 50 gram batches; the weight of a soul, it turns out, is 50 grams. When I first started as a coffee buyer, the company I worked for didn’t have a sample roaster, and so the first “coffee roaster” I’d ever used—a Poppery II popcorn popper I found buried in my parents’ basement in some b ..read more

15 minute read I don’t drink soda. Guy Fieri It was my fourth and final cupping of the day, and staring down at the mess of spent grounds and spilled coffee wrecking the table like seaweed at low tide or forgotten treasures unearthed in the snowmelt of spring, I dipped my spoon and set to work. I had enough caffeine coursing through my veins by that point that either through transcendence or tachycardia, the odds were good I’d see god. I’d taken 100g samples of green coffee and soaked them in eight different sodas (and one reference sample in brewing water) to rehydrate them, then dehydrate ..read more

19 minute read “Since the rise of the coffee shop, culture has disappeared, don’t you think? People are horrified that they have to pay for music. Music! But $20 for two coffees, oh, absolutely.” Noel Gallagher (singer, guitarist and frontman of Oasis) I didn’t plan to end up in coffee.  It’s one of those ice breakers that you can fall back on at any industry gathering, asking what meteor had to strike which road to divert you into the penniless pursuit of caffeinated, brown water—and my journey was no different. In college, I paid my way through second and third year working off-hours ..read more

6 minute read Leadership is a privilege to better the lives of others. It is not an opportunity to satisfy personal greed. Mwai Kibaki, third president of Kenya In the weeks since I published my post on the coffee industry in Kenya, I’ve had conversations with countless coffee producers, agents, and exporters in Kenya as well as roasters and green buyers from around the world. Through those conversations, I’ve learned a few things that felt worthy of including in a follow-up post. A sample of a coffee at an export cupping in Kenya. The outturn number—17KF0001—is stamped on the bagHow to ..read more

17 minute read The sun never sets on the British empire. attributed to John Wilson, 1829 Attending an auction cupping at an exporter’s office in Kenya, 2016 During one of his “yes or no” Instagram Q&As, Scott Rao lamented the declining quality of Kenyan coffees over the last three years—a sentiment I’ve heard echoed by buyers across Europe, the US, and Australia. He kicked a different question over to me about whether cultivar or microclimate or process has the greatest cup impact, and I demurred, offering that the relationship is gestalt but that processing ultimately had the final say ..read more

16 minute read Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting. Michael Pollan MSCO-11 koji growing on red bourbon at El Vergel I got a message from Kaapo Paavolainen of One Day Coffee on Telegram, I think, after he saw me snark on Jonathan Gagné’s Ad Astra channel about cinnamon and coffee. I personally don’t want cinnamon anywhere near a fermentation tank—but I also don’t believe it’s the role of (mostly white) competition judges or coffee buyers in consuming countries to dictate what is and is not acceptable processing practice. It hits a little too close to how “terroir” is a managed expectation ..read more