The companion to AVIARY#005, this is the second of our smallholder washed coffees from the 2024 harvest in the Southern highlands of Ethiopia. This coffee from 2024 Cup of Excellence #2 winner Mate Matiwos, processed using a hand-pulper and a protocol devised by Christopher Feran—is exclusive to Aviary and layered with complexity, presenting with notes of lilac, yuzu, peach and hints of blueberry. From Christopher: 'I first visited Mate Matiwos's drying station in Keramo Soto in 2022. He wasn't there—but his eldest son, Mamush Mate, was. They didn't have any coffee to sell, and we spent more time visiting than we should have—partly because we were taken by the waterfall adjacent to his land on the Geta river, and partly because the hope of what Mamush promised on behalf of his father: that he had a higher elevation site, in Keramo, and that next year, he would sell coffee from there to us. A year later, Mate's farm was one of our last stops on the way out of Bensa. We'd spent the week with the larger group of Bensa producers Crop to Cup purchases from, planning the year's projects—such as buying hand pulpers for Bekele Belaychow (of AVIARY#005) and Basha Bekele—but I was eager to see Mate's farm at nearly 2300 meters, planted just 5 years ago with variety 74158. Walking his farm in Keramo, I made an immediate request to Moata: 'Could we get another pulper for Mate?' Because washed coffees in Ethiopia must legally be exported, we guaranteed the purchase of any lot processed using the pulpers we provided. This lot was the result of Mate's first attempt; because the machine needed to be adjusted and because the coffee wasn't agitated sufficiently at the end of fermentation, more mucilage remained on the coffee in the first run through the process than we intended. Moata observed that it looked more like a black honey and isolated the lot, keeping it separate through to milling. The resulting 59kg of green coffee—a fermented, washed-style black honey—is exclusive to Aviary. Because of the small size of the lot, it was milled and sorted for defects by hand. We never tasted the coffee before it arrived to us in May 2024 via air shipment; we bought it sight unseen, cup untasted—based purely on our knowledge of the producer, his farm and confidence in the protocol. I couldn't be more thrilled with the result: a complex, tangy, vibrant cup with notes of rosehip, lilac, yuzu and peach with underlying hints of blueberry.