In this edition: six new coffees and a Yemeni coffee with a truly bonkers backstory (read to the end).
Not in this edition: the 61-year-old woman tackled and arrested by police for wearing a penis costume.
If you're enjoying these e-mails, I would be so appreciative if you would forward this to anyone you think might enjoy it too. And if you received this e-mail from a friend, you can subscribe here.
If you subscribed in the last week and want to see what you've missed — hit the archive.
And a quick note: Last week, I teased a story about decafs. That will now come out in two weeks. Share your favorites here. The discussion below with Christopher Feran had to publish this week for a reason that will become evident as you read on.
Coffee leftovers
I had my bud Jeremy from Preface over to my house this weekend and we made some coffee together. Maybe too much. I don't know, but it's Thursday and my hands are still shaking.
If you want 40g of the thermal shock sidra from El Mirador that Jeremy roasted (and that I featured last week), or 50g of Heza from Passenger (my first-ever specialty coffee) – just reply to the newsletter and I'll send it off to you.
Welcome to the eighth edition of the coffee index.
Over the past seven days, I added 83 coffees and five roasters to the list. Total coffees tracked to date = 2710.
- This coffee sounds bonkers. First of all, it uses an experimental fermentation with a live culture built from previous coffee harvests (MoonGoat, the roaster, says it's like a sourdough starter). Secondly, the Hernández family uses "a natural caffeine extraction derived from coffee pulp." Have I been living under a rock? I've never heard of this before. It's not fully decaffeinated, but it's a low-caf. Pretty wild stuff. Tasting notes: Vanilla, pu'er tea, bubble gum.
- Boozy, jammy, deep and dark – this coffee sounds like the quintessential naturally processed Ethiopian coffee. Welcome Color Coffee Roasters in Eagle, Colorado to the newsletter, and welcome this offering from producer Reshad Ababulgu that was listed for sale on Sunday. Reshad grows coffee on a farm in Agaro that's been in his family for 60 years. If you like anaerobic natural coffees from Africa, this one ought to be up your alley. Color sells a white honey processed version of this coffee as well. Tasting notes: Blackberry mead, plum sauce, chicory, molasses.
- It's hard not to think about failure when you start something new and aren't sure if anybody will care about it. That's why I was inspired by the story of Jhonatan Gasca. In 2010, he tried (and failed) to become a professional soccer (err, football?) player. He then studied coffee producing and began experimenting with fermentation on his father's coffee farm. He failed and moved on. Years later, he was encouraged by some very well-known coffee producers to try again, and in 2018 he found success on his farm, Zarza. This thermal shock washed pacamara from Black & White is a "testament to Jhonatan's resilience and fortitude." What a great story. Tasting notes: Cherry blossom, raspberry, peach tea, chocolate ganache.
- Probably due to personal preference, I don't write about a ton of super chocolatey coffees. But this one, sourced through Unblended's young producer program and roasted by Seekers in Princeton, New Jersey, caught my eye. "A jubilant, hyper chocolatey" black honey processed castillo variety, it's called Eid Brownie and was first released in April to mark the end of Ramadan. Seekers says it's a dense coffee that's "like a perfectly baked brownie after a long fast." The coffee was grown by Carolina Ramírez and her mother on their family farm in Antioquia. Tasting notes: Cocoa, caramel, red fruit, bright citrus.
- Okay okay, I can't help myself. Eighty dollars for 50g of coffee is not for everyone – it's not for me, necessarily – but it's also roughly 10x less expensive per cup than the $228 a cup gesha from Finca Nuguo! It's from Sey, a perennial favorite, and comes from the highly acclaimed Finca Sophia in Volcán, Panama. When I told Sey founder Lance Schnorenberg I'd be writing about this coffee, he asked if I'd tasted it yet. When I said no, he said "well I haven't either, I roasted it and then flew to Peru." He cupped it yesterday with Pepe Jijon. Afterward, he told me he thinks it's the best coffee Sey will sell all year. This coffee was harvested in the early morning hours of March 28 and 31 and depulped at 4pm those same days. Buying a coffee with that kind of specific knowledge about its harvest is a real treat. Ah man, maybe I've been convinced to buy it. Tasting notes: Articulated florality, ripe tropical fruit, exceptional structure, deep complexity.
- You cannot buy this coffee. It comes from Christopher Feran's Aviary – and you'll only receive a bag of it if you're subscribed to his 2025 season of coffee releases. Feran commissioned this offering from Hudaifa Tayeb, who partnered with 4th-generation coffee farmer Yusuf Al Aalam to produce something Feran had never heard of in Yemen before: a wet-processed coffee. Read to the end of the story below to learn much more about Aviary and the lengths Feran went to to buy this particular coffee.
"In 2023, I contracted a coffee from Yemen. I worked through my networks there and had a coffee made and shipped. And it got destroyed on the Red Sea. I don't know if you recall, but there were some shenanigans—"
I interrupt Christopher Feran, the infinitely knowledgeable coffee consultant, roaster and student of geopolitics and macroeconomics.
"Like, blown up?" I ask.
"Yeah, the boat got attacked. So that coffee was gone," Feran says. "It was not insured."
He pauses.
"So then my dumbass response is, well, let's do it again. Let's buy more," he continues. "So I prepaid for 90 kilos at $20 a pound last August, and it just arrived. But I never tasted it before. I didn't know if it was going to come. The last one didn't come. And it's those types of big risks that I wanted to be able to do that are utterly irresponsible in any other context. But with Aviary, I can do it."
No matter how deep you are into the world of coffee, you may never feel like you know enough. This, for me, rang especially true after I got off the phone with Feran. The man is a genius.
I am also totally indebted to him, because before I ever sent a single newsletter, I e-mailed him to ask if he’d want to talk about Aviary, his roasting project, and other nerdy coffee things. Despite having never met me, he was game to do it and a few weeks later gave me 30 minutes of his time and answered all of my dumb questions.
Feran is launching the second prepaid season of Aviary on October 25. The antithesis of a drop project, it’s a rather unique business model – he aims to sell out of 500 subscriptions by the end of this year and sell no coffee (or very little of it) in 2026. For $445, you’ll receive one coffee a month in 2026. That’s it. He doesn’t tell you what coffees you’re buying, but you just know they’ll be excellent. Lance Hedrick said in August that Aviary is the only coffee he drinks that’s roasted in the U.S.
"I kind of regard Aviary as an experiment," Feran says. "For me, it is an opportunity to exercise a mentality of show, don't tell."
Show what though?
"Rather than letting consumers decide if they wanted to buy a coffee or not, which is sort of a commodity perspective, I wanted them to subscribe to the philosophy of the work of a coffee buyer. When I go to buy coffee, I am contracting six to 12 months in the future. Sometimes those coffees haven't even been produced yet. So there's a certain amount of risk that I take on, not only in terms of the quality of the coffee, but also the quantities that I contract. And so getting people into a purchasing group gave me a little bit of assurance and certainty that I would be able to purchase a minimum amount of coffee."
The model also works to show how coffee producers face fragile cash flow concerns and volatile economic factors that are out of their control.
"For a coffee producer, they have one harvest a year, and they get paid maybe one month of the 12 calendar months, and they have to budget an entire year of expenses from that," Feran says. "And I'm doing the same thing now, which gives me a little bit of a better understanding of the precariousness of like, well, what the hell happens if six months into the year, Donald Trump decides to impose a tariff? My year was already budgeted, and now my entire expense structure shifts, but it doesn't matter, because all of the cash that I brought in was in January. So I think it's a really interesting experiment in that way as well."
Feran recently described the experiment to Hedrick as "a trust fall."
"I know that it forces people to trust me, which is something that I lose a lot of sleep over and do take quite a bit of responsibility for," he told me.
I don’t think he has much to worry about.
And oh yeah, about that Yemeni coffee he prepaid for last August: Eight percent of Feran’s cost went to paying bribes. To the internationally recognized Yemeni government, yes, but also to Houthi rebels (the same ones who blew up his shipment two years prior).
You just know those bribes will be worth it.
Thanks, as always, for reading. If you have an idea for a future newsletter, want to talk coffee, or have any feedback whatsoever — you can reply to this e-mail.
Next week: new coffees as always, plus a conversation with two people named Nathan about the coffee scene in one of my favorite places in America.
Thanks for reading.
Jeff