021 - Renato Martinez

This is likely to be an Aviary 2025 season subscriber exclusive; we anticipate that this coffee will be roasted for 2025 season subscribers the week of December 14, 2025.

The twelfth and final coffee of our 2025 season comes from a single producer in Mazeteca in Oaxaca, Mexico—a washed process  presenting in a bright, fruited cup with notes of pomegranate, hibiscus, lime and melon. 

From Christopher: "Specialty coffee's fascination with transparency information is one that, I believe, arises from noble intentions. By identifying a producer—by name and by face—and telling their history with a record of the price they were paid for their coffee, we seem to believe we're closing the distance that coffee travels through complex supply chains across the world.

While transparency can serve as a tool to mitigate concerns of financial exploitation by showing that a 'fair price' was paid, the way we report it may lack sufficient context by which a consumer could make a determination around fairness or equity. Further, while bridging the gap between consumers and producers can help producers access a broader, more specific, more competitive market and thus receive a better price, it's also possible to levy criticisms against this practice—particularly if it relies on tokenization of a producer's image to sell coffee or imply a closeness or relationship that doesn't genuinely exist. That is to say: good intentions don't protect against all possible scenarios or contexts.

"In some situations, using imagery or details about a producer to market a coffee—with sufficient specificity to identify them locally—can create risks to their security and safety, particularly when the price paid for a coffee is dramatically out of step with the local price in places with limited government participation in daily life. In these contexts, we explore the tension between consumers’ and roasters’ desire for transparency and the practical realities of working in and buying from conflict zones—places torn apart by war, politics and history.

"There, to hold the fabric of communities intact, sometimes we must not stand apart, but stand together.

"Sierra Mazateca in Mexico is one such context that requires careful consideration as well as an understanding of the problematic history of encounters between indigenous communities and outsiders, security threats from narcotraffickers and federales, and the social risks posed by operating outside the local norms. After the collapse of the ejido system of land use under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's neoliberal 'reforms,' many indigenous communities moved into the highlands—intentionally far from the reach of government, and in lands too inaccessible for exploitation by the government or corporations. Most of the communities don't speak Spanish—instead speaking Nahuatl or Mixtec or Zapotec or Maya or Mazatec—and the difficulty of navigating the terrain compounded their isolation, making accessing or aggregating coffee as difficult as the importance of those communities maintaining internal social cohesion and preserving their cultural identity.

"After the ICA collapsed, so too did prices for coffee—which by 1983 accounted for 35% of Mexico's agricultural exports. The Coordination of Coffee Grower Organizations estimates that as a result of the ensuing coffee crisis, Mexican coffee growers would have lost 65% of their potential revenues since the start of the crisis. As a result, 71% of coffee growers stopped using fertilizers, 40% reduced pruning, and 75% stopped investing in control of pests, leading to lower qualities, yields and resiliency ahead of the coffee leaf rust outbreak in Latin America in 2012.

"In response, many of the coffee growers in Mexico—who today number more than 500,000, 85% of whom are indigenous and with 95% growing coffee on fewer than 3 hectares of land—organized into informal cooperatives or otherwise collaborated to mitigate their risk and attempt to access the best price for their coffee.

"Buying coffees like this one in the way it was purchased—outside of those cooperative structures and bypassing local coyotes who have operated as virtual monopolies and suppressed prices and capturing any premiums paid themselves—is difficult, requiring the building of trust over years and a delicate hand. If the price paid were to be discovered locally it could incite jealousy, theft or, in some cases, violence—or merely break trust and the social contract in the community, eroding longstanding social bonds as well as access to market for those communities.

"And so we present this coffee under an assumed name—and without a portrait. It's not merely an act of respect—it's in keeping with the spirit of the agreement we've made with the third-party agent whose relationships we rely on to access coffees in these communities and whose staff on the ground must maintain their own networks of trust. 

"In the end, we have a coffee that is able to speak for itself: an old rootstock Typica processed in a traditional manner that presents in the cup with fruited notes of dried raspberry, pomegranate, hibiscus, lime and bright orange acidity."