This piece is inspired by Aviary’s ninth release in 2024 from Abelardo Medina. 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 to the 2025 season or ordering individual releases that look interesting to you.
I spend much of the day on my phone, a habit I’m self-aware enough to detest and one that’s incontrovertible to anyone who’s timed the speed of my WhatsApp responses. Time zones and the latency of replies returning from a torrent of texts sent the morning or night before ensure that there’s always an inbound distraction. I thought I’d be doing more cupping—and I never expected to achieve this level of fluency with Google Sheets.
We like to imagine buyers as explorers of brigadoon hinterlands, making their way through jungles and across mountains on motorbike, balancing sacks of coffee like scales of justice on our backs as we make our way back toward civilization. But being a “coffee buyer” is a job that bears little resemblance to the way I might have imagined it or Hollywood depictions of Todd Carmichael cheating death in a quest for the best coffee.
At the end of it all, I was surprised to learn just exactly how much of this job is actually done by everyone else, and through the work of everyone else. I just play with my phone.
I became a coffee buyer in 2012, as the third wave movement gained strength and resonance in smaller markets in the U.S. The term “direct trade” had only recently entered the lexicon a decade before, but it did so with escape velocity—and without formal definition or regulation of the term. With the rise of those so-called direct trade coffee programs at U.S. roasteries came marketing campaigns to support them and use them as a point of differentiation. Many demonized “middlemen” like importers and exporters—supply chain actors depicted as unscrupulous characters, buying coffee from farmers at low prices, selling them for high, and pocketing the difference. It was easy to feel this way at the time—the coffee market had soared 77% in the wake of crop collapses as roya spread across Latin America stemming from the 2008 failure of the global financial system. We knew that coffee growers weren’t getting paid a fair price—having been well educated by Fair Trade on the issue—and then the recession hit. But prices were high—and roasters felt the strain.
This past week, the C-market crossed 300 for the third time in history, and maintains backwardation for only the fourth time. With spot inventories in the U.S. and EU at lows and with growing uncertainty, it’s easy to feel this way again: Why do we even need middlemen, anyway? Can’t we just buy direct, save some money, and pay the farmer more, too? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone?
How hard can it be to source coffee?
In 2020, on the day the world shut down, I was meant to board a plane to Mexico. There, I’d visit a community of producers in Oaxaca I hoped to buy from, forging connections and helping to build context for the coffees before they ever reached my cupping table. The trip was organized by the importer I’d hoped to work with for this coffee, and they, in turn, worked with an exporter to arrange for ground transportation, lodging, logistics—and access to coffees that I could purchase.
The group of producers we hoped to buy from grew old rootstock Pluma and Typica trees under dense canopy at elevations of 1800-2000 meters. After the collapse of the ejido system of land use by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, many indigenous communities like this one moved into the highlands—intentionally far from the reach of government, and in lands too inaccessible for exploitation by the government or corporations. The land there was perfect, though, for growing high quality specialty coffee.
The Spanish I spoke—enough to get by in CDMX or Oaxaca city though at this point embarrassingly elementary—wouldn’t have been of any use. The indigenous communities we planned to visit didn’t speak Spanish, and we didn’t speak Mixtec. For communication—to understand each other and ensure that understandings were attached to intended and culturally appropriate meanings—we relied on an agent, a part of the community himself who could form a bridge between his neighbors and the visiting outsiders.
Working through agents is critical in these contexts—indigenous communities are remote both geographically and culturally, by choice and consequence of history, which adds to the complexity of the work—but it adds a haze of caution and hesitation to every exchange. Access to these communities is rare; rightful suspicion of and caution toward outsiders serves as armor left by historical interactions between their community and those outside of it, protecting the identity of their people as well as their resources from further exploitation. We need to trust the agent hired to work on our behalf—but we know that they, appropriately, must be wary: As an outsider, they can’t fully trust you.
After you leave, after the money is exchanged, when you’ve boarded your plane back to the U.S., the agent returns to their life and their communities and their homes, often the same communities from which you purchased coffee. If we didn’t engage honestly with them, or if we took advantage, it’s ultimately that agent (and the producers he represented) who will suffer the consequences—and our access to coffees grown by these communities will be, rightfully and righteously, restricted.
Without an agent, we wouldn’t be able to buy these coffees—let alone hold a conversation. But without access to other buyers, these producers would have sold their coffees to the coyote, just as they had for years before—likely receiving a lower price than they could have through other channels, were those channels available to them. The coyote in turn would sell that coffee to an exporter, at best, but more likely would sell it to another intermediary or the local market—rendering it diluted, indistinctive, and unremarkable, winnowed from a top lot into an imposed expectation for how coffee from that region tastes.
In the best case, when this brittle system works, it’s because we worked collaboratively, respectfully and honestly with an understanding of our role in the value stream and knowledge of the fact that these aren’t our coffees, our producers, or our communities—without someone working on our behalf, we couldn’t even get in the door, if we could find it at all.
The decisions a coffee producer makes will, of course, dictate much of a coffee’s eventual quality and cup profile. But even before the cherry is picked, circumstance will dictate what choices are possible. The cultivars of coffee available to a coffee grower, for example, may be determined simply by where in the world that producer is located. Regulatory restrictions on importation of plant material, or a lack of local germplasm, or a lack of financing or cash flow for renovation can shape a potential farm’s plantings—as can land use policies or land ownership/leasing agreements, neighboring parcels or a cavalcade of other circumstances outside of a producer’s control.
Access to the Internet or materials in the local language or support from an NGO or consultant or government agency might dictate if a producer processes their coffee according to “traditional” methods or in some other way, as well as what those traditional methods might be. A lack of infrastructure or scale or delays between the harvest and payment might mean that instead of processing the coffee herself, a farmer sells ripe cherry to someone else—a cooperative, or a coyote, or some other collector. If there is only a coyote or other intermediary to whom the coffee is sold, is it aggregated and blended or kept separate? Do they sort by ripeness before processing? Are they concerned only with volume of exports or quality? How long does it take to deliver that ripe cherry, or wet parchment (as is common in Nicaragua) and what happens to its quality potential along the way? And even if the producer sells dry parchment (as is common in Colombia)—how is it collected? Is there dry milling infrastructure capable of milling and sorting and screening microlots, or does a lack of infrastructure to support microlots means it skip steps that might improve the cup? And of course, how the coffee ships (by land, by sea, by air) or through which port or how the coffee arrives to port (are there roads? Did the bridge get washed away?) can introduce an element of time and weather and uncertainty into the cup.
So governments and banks make choices that impact what a farm grows, how they grow it, and how it’s processed. Coffees from Papua New Guinea might not need to taste the way they do or the way we expect them to, but the social, political and environmental contexts overlaid with a lack of robust domestic transportation infrastructure lead toward a certain tendency or outcome—but it’s not a given. A tree’s genetic potential for quality means nothing if it doesn’t grow with the appropriate human conditions.
Choices beget choices, and contexts beget other contexts; those contexts and decisions cascade into other contexts and decisions resulting in the final coffee.
But In the modern specialty coffee trade, much of this process—the process of curation and winnowing, a matrix and interface of restriction, available options, preferences and needs—typically begins with an exporter, who will collect, mill and differentiate between the coffees that are available to them, choosing the coffees that are exported as differentiated profiles, those that will be blended away, and those that will be let go to sell to other exporters or the local market.
Importers, who represent the needs of roaster clients, will winnow those coffees further—assessing their quality and cup profile but also the risk posed by the coffee. Importers will assert preferences for coffees and curate what profiles or qualities are available from the countries they buy from.
And so the curation continues further: collectors winnow available coffees from farmers; exporters winnow those deliveries into lots; importers winnow those available selections into products; and from those products roasters make their selections.
In other words: You don’t actually know if you don’t like coffees from Costa Rica: you just know you don’t like the ones that have been presented to you.
Importers aggregate volumes of coffee sufficient to maximize efficiency in transportation, minimize costs and expedite customs clearance. They’re typically experienced at shipping coffee to ensure the fastest possible routes and placement on a ship that will protect the integrity of the coffee being shipped. These competencies, in turn, benefit their roaster customers in the forms of lower costs, faster shipments and a higher likelihood of coffee arriving intact.
In the interest of growing their book of business, importers must work actively to foster loyalty within their supplier networks as well as to grow their networks to ensure that they have products available even in the face of disruption or crop failure elsewhere. For this reason (among others), It’s not in an importer’s best interest to burn bridges with suppliers—nor is it in their interest to burn bridges with roasters, who represent a network of potential homes for coffees.
Risk assessment is one critical function of importers. Since the purchase of the coffee will be financed, an importer must have confidence that they can bear the risk of the coffee sitting in spot inventory, accumulating interest and degrading in quality. That confidence comes from access to roaster buyers as well as an understanding of those roasters’ needs. Further, because they have access to a portfolio of coffees from exporter and producer networks, they can more easily than roasters, for example, contextualize coffees based on quality or preparation. Coffees with more unusual profiles or that are extremely expensive respective to their quality (regardless of profile) may get passed over. Because of the need to consolidate shipments into full container loads for maximizing efficiencies and economies of scale, an importer’s criteria for selection will likely be heavily influenced if not directly dictated by the needs of their largest or most profitable customers. “Risky” coffees like those with heavy process notes might take just a small part of an importer’s position, while bread-and-butter coffees like an 84-85 washed Central might take a larger piece. Importers spend considerable resources evaluating coffees prior to final contract approval to manage the risk of the coffee losing quality before arrival and losing value—often using equipment that is more reliable and methodology more robust than roasters, many of whom are staffed by small teams who wear many hats, are able to do themselves.
As the ones to bear the final cost if a coffee goes unsold, importers invest heavily at both ends of the supply chain—in sales and marketing to roasters (which includes sampling), as well as to quality discovery and development at origin. Some of this comes in the form of infrastructure—cupping labs in the U.S. and at origin, for example, or warehouses—and some comes in the form of operating costs like DHL and agents. Intimacy with chain of custody in a particular export context yields security for roasters; roasters can have greater confidence in sampling and quality down the line because of the investment and expertise marshaled and centralized by importers so as to mitigate risk. For roasters to excise importers from these tasks would expose them to potential risks, blindspots and failure points; without a budget for travel and without trust anchors or mechanisms for vetting supply chains, the risk of miscommunication, product failure and resulting mistrust runs higher.
In the case of a contract failure—a coffee is rejected on arrival, for example—importers have the opportunity to find a new buyer for that coffee (something they’re specialized to do, as selling coffee to roasters is their primary business) before liquidating it or reducing future contracts with the supplier. Contract cancellations are painful for everyone in the supply chain, but most of all for producers, particularly when those cancellations happen months after the coffee is prepared for export. Roasters who buy from importers pay for the privilege of shifting risk and risk assessment to the importer. But for roasters buying directly from producers, in the case of a contract cancellation or rejection, the producer is left holding the bag—often without sufficient context to understand why, or without recourse to make a claim, or without market access for a new sale. In this scenario, importers act as a clearinghouse for regulation of risk and stabilizing purchasing across the valuestream.
And then there’s finance: Even with the U.S. Federal Reserve relaxing prime rates, borrowing rates remain higher than in previous years. Roasters, who typically operate with very little inventory-on-hand and who are leveraged and with limited cash, often pay commercial rates for lines of credit or other forms of borrowing. Importers, by leveraging trade financing are able to access typically much lower rates—which they then mark up slightly and pass on to roasters. This enables roasters to purchase larger positions of coffee than they could otherwise afford out of cash flow but with cheaper financing. Risk of failures or of market volatility is absorbed through importer attachment to hedging activities both in terms of futures trading and currency hedging—if not through their specialty divisions, then through their financier’s or other commercial-focused parts of the business. While specialty offers greater margin in most contexts, its volume is small; by operating as a layer on top of commercial businesses, the supply chain remains more fluid, more stable, and less vulnerable to sudden shocks (though the current market situation might have us believe otherwise). Ultimately, the justice of this system is not a consideration insofar as the commodity traders are concerned—and even buyers, importers and roasters operating with a fixed cost margin are able to do so not in spite of but because of the existence of the commercial market and its scale, infrastructure and efficiencies.
To truly operate unattached to and not relying on the c-market, we need to imagine a different supply chain altogether—it’s not sufficient to simply cut out importers.
[nb: I’m not a fan of neoliberal markets or neoliberal tendencies to replace public utilities or government regulations benefiting the common good for those run by private corporations. I’ll have more to say on this another time—but this goes far beyond the scope and my intention of this piece]
I never boarded that plane to Mexico in March 2020. Instead, I spent four hours on the phone with Aeromexico canceling my flights and figuring out how to operate in a new reality without travel. I still had needs for coffees to fill my menu—but the networks through which coffee moves were unchanged.
In the age of WhatsApp and email and Google Translate and DHL, a coffee buyer doesn’t need to travel, doesn’t need to collect passport stamps or frequent flier miles. We can, with the help of space-age technology, communicate and interact with communities and growers directly with greater ease than ever before. Enterprising producers can and do engage with buyers directly now with a view toward accessing new markets and growing the value of their harvest.
But without a way to filter or move or aggregate or mill or finance or trust the integrity of these coffees, it doesn’t matter.
It would be nearly three years before I’d travel to a coffee producing region again—but because the importer I was buying from—the middleman—maintained these networks, coffee appeared, anyway, as if by magic. I didn’t pay for it upfront; I didn’t perform QA between the bodega and the mill, or the mill and port; I didn’t pay for customs clearance or bother with foreign currency exchange: I sent an email. Someone else did the rest.
These networks support communities economically and are the gates through which coffee flows from producers to export.
When we talk about “sourcing” coffees, we like to imagine that we’re discovering something new—but in reality, we’re receiving introductions and conversations from people whose trust we’ve earned and should strive to maintain. We cup the coffee we’re privileged to receive, and from those offers, we fill out our little spreadsheets.
We don’t source coffee—not really.
In 2024, I purchased nine coffees for Aviary. Those coffees came through relationships I’ve cultivated over my career as a buyer and roaster. In no case did I discover the producers myself; they came to me through conversations and introductions and other conversations. They tell the story of my career and my journey through the world.
The networks we’re part of grow over space and time, increasing in intricacy and complexity—constellations of relationships that collide and form new galaxies of bonds. This is where the real work happens.
I met Ana in 2017 through an introduction from Lucia Solis and Andrew Timko of Blueprint Coffee. Ana and Andrew met, originally, at a Coffee Fest or SCA Expo—back then, Ana and her family were looking to find roasters to sell their coffee to directly, and put considerable miles and time into meeting with prospective buyers. In the 7 years since, there’s nowhere I’ve visited more times, I think, than Finca Esperanza—and Ana and her family continue to be central to my purchasing for all of my clients, finding coffees on my behalf and making introductions to other producers through Two Birds, their import company.
001: FINCA SAN JERÓNIMO MIRAMAR
I learned about Finca San Jeronimo Miramar from San Knowlton at Soil Symbiotics, who suggested I’d be interested in their agroforestry, mixed-agricultural use farm. He was right. I waited years to purchase this coffee but avidly sought it out in the U.S. when it was available (Dark Matter, notably, buys quite a bit of coffee from FSJM). As I was completing the Aviary Kickstarter campaign, I asked Sam for an introduction via WhatsApp to Giorgio, and we’ve been exchanging ideas ever since.
I’ve still never been to Peru—an inexcusable, inexplicable fact—but I met Joel Eastlick of Yellow Rooster Coffee back in 2015 when he and I both lived in Brooklyn and roasted at Pulley Collective. He’d go on to start a roasting company, move to Tampa and then, from there, start an import company. When Aviary launched, Joel was in Peru and posted a story on Instagram from the cupping lab. I caught a glance of his cupping sheet in the background with the number “92” circled next to a coffee. I’d cupped with Joel dozens if not hundreds of times over the years—so I sent a message, asking him if I could buy the coffee for Aviary. The coffee was from Maria—for whom Yellow Rooster financed the purchase of Gesha seedlings—seedlings which had just produced their first harvest.
Like Joel, I met Kyle Bellinger of Osito Coffee when we roasted together at Pulley Collective in Brooklyn. He’d go on to meet Jose Jadir Losada of El Mirador through an exporter and, when Jose’s brother was selling his stake in their farm, Kyle stepped in to become Jose’s partner. A couple years later, they established an export company based in Colombia and import company in the U.S., both named Osito. Jose’s rolodex runs deep, and he’s worked hard to earn the trust of the producers Osito buys from each year. Much of Osito’s buying was in La Plata, Suaza and San Agustin, with just one producer in Paico—Gildardo—made possible through an introduction from another producer. I met Gildardo in Colombia at the Copa de Oro competition, where he and his sons submitted coffee to the competition—and won.
During my first visit to Colombia, I met Salomé Puentes (now of Teco Coffeehouse in Guatemala, then of Caravela Coffee). My rep double-booked, so Salomé stepped in to host. We were fast friends—and when I told her about a processing trial I hoped to conduct, Salo paired me with a rising talent in Caravela’s network—Lino Rodriguez. After that visit, I bought coffee from Lino and his family until his CoE wins and reputation for quality justifiably pushed his coffees out of the budget of the companies I worked for. When I started Aviary, I knew I wanted his coffee to be among the first releases.
005: BEKELE BELAYCHOW
007: MATE MATIWOS
008: BASHA BEKELE
Moata Raya, Crop to Cup Ethiopia’s sourcing chief, seems to know everyone—or, at least, everyone seems to know him. He’s a distinctive presence: his smile is as wide as he is tall, and his experience in Ethiopian coffee goes back to his studies in agronomy at University of Jimma and his work as a technician for Technoserve, helping to establish some of the most famous cooperatives in Western Ethiopia. In 2022, when I’d return to Ethiopia to help Crop to Cup with their sourcing strategy and to lead those efforts, I had the privilege of working alongside Moata as a colleague. His skill as a cupper and cultural and linguistic fluency (not to mention his two cell phones, which ring constantly) are the portal to Ethiopia’s multidimensional coffee world. Through Bekele, we’d meet many other producers Crop to Cup would buy from—and those producers connected us to other producers, including Mate Matiwos.
I occasionally get a message from Lucas at Unblended Coffee that he’s sending me samples for feedback. I’d met him at a covid-era Expo—Seattle I think, but who remembers, really—after chatting with him over WhatsApp following an introduction from Lucia. In March, I was looking for a coffee I could buy on short notice ahead of Expo for a collaboration with xbloom; as it happened, Lucas had just sent a parcel of samples. In it, there was a coffee from Jhon Didier Trujillo, a coffee producer they met through another coffee producer in Urrao, where Unblended was building a new project. It was his first harvest—and I was eager to introduce his coffee to other buyers in the hope of helping him find a broader market.
When Kyle was looking for roasters to work with in Osito’s early days, I was eager. One of the first purchases I made was from an informal cooperative in Huila; I’d bought nearly the group’s entire production, separating it by quality for use both in blends and single origins. Before he worked for Osito Colombia as the purchasing and warehouse manager in La Plata, I knew Didier Pajoy as a coffee producer and technician who helped organize his neighbors in La Plata and another group of producers in La Argentina into that group. As the biggest buyer of coffee from that original group and its successor, Grupo Mártir, I became familiar with the way Didier operated and valued him not only for his knowledge and skill as a coffee producer but also for his cupping spoon. Didier messaged me one day on Instagram after seeing one of my stories about Ethiopia, saying, “I know you like Pink Bourbons. This year,” he said, “there are coffees in La Plata equal to Ethiopians—from a producer whose name is Abelardo Medina.” I didn’t know Abelardo; but if nothing else, buying coffee is a game of chance and a game of trust. We work through trusted agents and build contracts and finance around trust anchors. The leads that come our way for new supply chains and new partners come from referrals through those networks of trust. And I trust Didier: so when he asks me to take notice, I take notice. I contracted the last available lot of Abelardo’s coffee from an upcoming ocean shipment of coffee from Colombia through Osito. There was no pre-ship material available, and I wasn’t able to sample before contracting. But because I can rely on the networks and systems Osito has built and because I’ve worked deeply with their team, I had confidence—confidence which was rewarded upon arrival.
Tags: buying green coffee sourcing supply chain trust