025 - Maria Nieves

The fourth coffee of our 2026 season is an Aviary-exclusive and our third from the producer of one of Aviary's earliest releases: Maria Nieves. After shipping disruptions impacted the cup quality of last year's release, our determination to purchase from many of the same producers year-over-year rewards us in 2026 as Maria returns to full strength with a bright, tropical, complex cup.

From Christopher: "Of all of Aviary's releases in our inaugural season, the one I've longed to taste again came from Maria Nieves and the first year of production of her Gesha trees. That harvest resulted in a coffee that was not only the highest-scoring coffee of all coffees I bought in 2023-2024, but also one of my favorite coffees of Aviary's first season. Ahead of the 2025 season, I committed to purchasing Maria's coffee again—my second purchase from Maria Nieves Tantalean Fernandez, whose leadership of Asprocafe Alpes Andinos ensures a fair price for the members of the cooperative.

"But harvest and export in Peru in 2024 came during a particularly tumultuous period. Lower yields and a rapidly-rising market created not only liquidity challenges but also led to defaults for many cooperatives in the country. These problems delayed exports—as did huge waves that struck the Peruvian coastline during peak export season. When Maria's coffee did eventually make its way to the Port of New Jersey in 2025, three months late, it had been exposed to heat, humidity and long transit times—all of which are detrimental to quality. I'd paid a premium for a coffee that arrived faded. I did what I could—using rehydration and a very light roast—to present the coffee in the best possible light, all while remembering how great it used to be.

"The back of the Aviary box features the same phrase that emblazens our homepage: Coffee is an expression of time. 'Time' refers not only to the longitudinal nature of coffee production—with a tree producing after 3-5 years, ripening happening over 9 months, harvest over 2-3, and shipping over weeks or months more—but also meant to depict the very transient and ephemeral nature of coffee. Rather than tasting like a place, a coffee tastes of a particular moment.

"So when it was time to contract coffee for our 2026 season, I again reached out to our partners at Yellow Rooster in Peru to talk about buying from Maria. With the market at all-time highs and competition in Peru compounding premiums on exotic varieties like Gesha, Yellow Rooster was understandably cautious about their contracting, particularly after the shipping issues they faced last year. Risk means different things depending on your vantage in the supply chain, but for an importer, risk of product failure—of paying a premium for a coffee that might need to be sold at a loss—is an unacceptable outcome in a market plagued by illiquidity and expensive financing.

"While roasters can simply choose not to buy, producers do not have the luxury of choosing not to sell: coffee production is their business, with coffee itself being the product. And with harvest occurring just once a year, most producers survive on credit and other forms of financing; a single harvest sold at a loss or sold below market pricing doesn't just have a single year impact, but rather may impact profitability for years to come by reducing a producer's ability to re-invest in their farm's management.

"As a roaster, when we buy coffee year-over-year, we help to mitigate risk for producers and create stability. And so, we committed to purchase again.

"Buying year-over-year enables us to taste the progression of time over every season and the impacts of every variable on the cup. Even producers who are in the highest elevations growing the highest-quality cultivars may experience disruptions—through labor shortages, climate change, war, political disruption, market volatility or 10 meter waves that delay shipping—that result in years of worse quality, as we experienced last year.

"But by choosing to buy anyway—even in down years—we have the privilege of being there when the quality is once again meteoric.

"And this year, it is, indeed meteoric: a complex, mouth-filling, bright, vibrant coffee with notes of bergamot, rosehip, passionfruit, raspberry and tangerine.