014 - Maria Nieves

014 - Maria Nieves2025 FREEZER SALE UPDATE (2025 12 17): From Christopher: We're once again rehydrating this coffee for the freezer saleusing vacuum to better homogenize moisture in the lot ahead of roasting in the hopes of reducing cup variance. As the Roest P3000 uses inlet as its control schema, we will be roasting this one manually to ensure that it roasts evenlyrehydrated coffees tend to require significantly more energy in the middle of the roast to drive off

2025 FREEZER SALE UPDATE (2025-12-17):

From Christopher: We're once again rehydrating this coffee for the freezer sale—using vacuum to better homogenize moisture in the lot ahead of roasting in the hopes of reducing cup variance. As the Roest P3000 uses inlet as its control schema, we will be roasting this one manually to ensure that it roasts evenly—rehydrated coffees tend to require significantly more energy in the middle of the roast to drive off excess moisture. 

The fifth coffee of our 2025 season continues this year's exploration of non-Panamanian Geshas and comes to us from the producer of one of Aviary's first releases: Maria Nieves. Like Nancy Mendoza, Maria planted Gesha seeds that came to Peru via Costa Rica in an effort to improve her family's prosperity through the cultivation of high-quality specialty coffee.

From Christopher: "The first year of production of Maria Nieves' Gesha trees 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 third purchase through Yellow Rooster, and second from Maria Nieves Tantalean Fernandez, whose leadership of Asprocafe Alpes Andinos ensures a fair price for the members of the cooperative.

"When we buy coffee year-over-year, we help to mitigate risk for producers and create stability. Though Aviary's purchasing volume was small, the high premium paid to Maria helped to offset a season of overall lower yields.

"The chaos of the universe often makes itself part of the profile of the coffees we enjoy, and the story of this coffee is no different. 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 this coffee did eventually make its way to the Port of New Jersey, 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 immediately vacuum-sealed and froze the coffee at -20ºC as a way to protect it from further degradation until it was ready for release.

"This situation, I believe, is when roasters show not only their character but their skill. I noted paper flavors in the cup—a hallmark of fade—but rather than rejecting the coffee based on quality, forcing the importer to liquidate at a loss, I used rehydration and roasting techniques that I'd developed to render this coffee as close as possible to its former glory—which had presented with notes of bright raspberry, tangerine and jasmine."