This blog is available for free and wholly subsidized by Aviary. To support this blog and the work I do—and to place the writings I publish here in context of the coffees that inspired them—please consider subscribing or ordering individual releases that look interesting to you.

In the last nine months, I’ve released nine coffees under the Aviary label through a limited-availability drop model. My hope was that through Aviary I would be able to use my platform to explore topics and curiosities inspired by the coffees I released and highlight behind-the-scenes work deep in the supply chain that often passes unnoticed. I wanted the brand to be founded upon the notion of exploration—of ideas, of ways of operating a coffee roasting business—and still to this day regard Aviary as an experiment.

But releasing just nine coffees over the course of a year means that all of the associated operating costs for the company must be spread over that small volume of orders, making the price often inaccessible to the broader specialty market and creating an apparent disparity between the prices I pay for green coffee and its retail price. I justify this—fairly, I believe—by noting that Aviary is in fact a vehicle that monetizes and subsidizes this blog, which, since its inception, I have made available to all, for free. I don’t intend to walk back that principle. 

The very limited availabilities of coffees I release, though, presents another quandary for a business that ships across the world: time zones and rational management of sleep hygiene don’t always permit access to the releases by those who might most enjoy them. And while I’ve worked to make the sale of microlots and nanolots a worthwhile endeavor for the producers I buy from—many of whom I directly collaborated with to produce these lots—I believe that evolving Aviary’s model slightly would allow a greater impact and exploration of alternate ways to exist within commodified global supply chains.

So for 2025, Aviary will operate with a new model: we’re offering reservations for a full season of coffee. 

With this reservation, in addition to securing a box of each official release (free of the chaos and FOMO associated with limited drops), Aviary members will have the first opportunity to purchase additional bags of coffee (pending availability) at a discount versus the retail price—as well as the first chance to order exclusive, experimental and micro-drops which are too small to make available to the group as a whole.

The idea here is to pool Aviary customers into a purchasing group, enabling me to pre-contract coffees for that group and, in some cases, pre-pay or pre-finance those coffees yet to be produced. This model is inspired by community supported agriculture models in the U.S. and is a way to leverage consumer interest to supersede some of the greatest challenges faced to businesses across the industry—namely, liquidity and access to financing.

My hope is that this model will allow Aviary to grow in a way that is financially sustainable, does not compromise on quality nor our values, and empowers me both to take risks as a buyer as well as take risk away from producers. While Aviary’s purchasing volumes will continue to remain small and thus our impact through those transactions infinitesimally limited on the grand scale of the global coffee trade, I’d like to continue to explore new ways of doing business as well as use my platform to highlight, promote and elevate producers and their work—as well as find conversations surrounding those coffees.

Further, For 2025, though, rather than attempting to produce a piece of writing in support of every individual Aviary release—a pace which I fell behind owing to the demands of this schedule and due to the complexity of some of the pieces—I hope to arrange the releases more thoughtfully into themes which I can address more comprehensively. This way, I can give complex topics the attention they deserve to fully examine the underlying context, histories and nuance of these coffees.

For those customers who subscribe, thank you in advance for the trust you place in my sourcing and roasting; I aim to continue to produce the styles of coffee I enjoy drinking and commit to using the revenues from Aviary to engaging with the work of buying coffee in a critical and responsible way.