Third Wave Coffee and the Formation of Taste (and Value)

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“Orange blossom, white tea, syrupy”

“Grapefruit, spicy pepper, olive oil”

“Chocolate, red berries, roasted barley”

The language used to talk about new high-end coffee comes straight out of the wine world, with exotic and evocative descriptors and even a 0-100 grading scale (à la Robert Parker). Scores above 80 mark “specialty” coffee (such as would be served at Starbucks) and scores in the high 80s and breaking 90 place beans in the rarefied world of Third Wave coffees that retail for $5, $6, $7 a cup and more than $25 a pound for roasted beans (although usually sold in 12oz, or increasingly 6oz, packages to both stress the limited supply and make the price tag slight less eye-popping).

Virtually all high-end coffees are of the species Arabica; among Arabicas there are a range of different varieties. A growing number of exclusive lots of green coffee have sold for more than $100 a pound, a ceiling first broken in 2007 by the storied Geisha varietal from Hacienda La Esmeralda in Panama. In 2012, a Mocca (a heirloom varietal originally from Yemen) grown by the Finca El Injerto in Guatemala sold for $500.50 a pound, still a record. (Meanwhile, the commodity price for quality washed Arabica, known as the New York C price, has fluctuated between $1.13 and $1.46 over the first 8 months of 2016)

Are these coffees worth that much? People often ask me this when I talk about Third Wave coffee. If you haven’t tried one yet, it is a different experience than either the office kitchen’s K-cup or even a solid cup of coffee from most neighborhood coffee shops. A whole range of subtle flavors come out in the clean, smooth, balanced cup profile; sugar and milk are, naturally, verboten.

Yes, but are they worth the high price? It depends on how we value them. In high-end markets that move toward singularity (limited edition prints, that particular Bordeaux vintage, the 2012 El Injerto Mocha), normal market forces of supply and demand don’t apply. Which leads us to consider what constitutes value for such non-commodities and how do we put a price on that.

Objective quality (by established tasting standards and conventions) and market scarcity play an important role, but we cannot discount the symbolic values at play: the relative positioning of conspicuous consumption; the imagined, personal relationship with a producer; and underwriting it all, the cultural and market shift among the global affluent toward artisanal and singular products. The language used to talk about Third Wave coffee borrows heavily from fine wine, ideas of terroir, and the artisanal food movement. And this provenance, these narratives, are key to its value.

Three Waves

The first wave of coffee consumption lasted from the late nineteenth century up through the 1960s, marked by the spread of commodity coffee and the rise of Folgers, Maxwell House, and all the other familiar grocery store brands.

The second wave started in the 1960s in the U.S. with Peet’s in San Francisco and Zabar’s in New York, and culminating in the spread of Starbucks to every nook and cranny of the country, and increasingly the world. Anthropologist William Roseberry describes this as a shift from coffee as being the beverage of capitalism (coffee and sugar serving as great proletarian hunger killers, as Sidney Mintz has pointed out) to being a beverage of postmodernity (an outlet for performing identity and difference).

The Third Wave coffees take this to the next, artisanal infused, level. Coming out of coffee shops in Portland, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Nashville, Washington, Philadelphia, and other cities, Third Wave has both hipster and foodie associations; it is sold by online retailers such as Stumptown, Intelligentsia, and Blue Bottle.

Creating Taste and Value

The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA, the trade group for specialty and Third Wave coffee) goes to great lengths to bolster the scientific credibility of its classifications and tasting protocols. The more objective they seem, they more they can impart the power of authenticity (discovering something rather than constructing it).

The SCAA-associated Coffee Quality Institute certifies coffee cuppers with its Q Grader certification, with applicants having to pass five “triangulation cuppings” to differentiate a total of 90 distinct coffees. A Roast magazine article on the allure of triangulated cupping, observes that even a novice will quickly learn to distinguish coffees from different world regions, then so after by country. For example, “a Latin American coffee is going to taste different than an African coffee,” and tasting them side by side reveals the differences. “Put an Ethiopia Harrar into two cups and Sumatra Mandheling in one cup, and you will know the difference,” the article claims. Or, at least, you will learn the differences in going through a cupping protocol. One Portland roaster loved “the earthiness of the Sumatra” and another noted that Central American coffees are known for an exceptionally clean acidity (Allen 2010: 58).

In 2015 the SCAA unveiled a new flavor chart for specialty coffee. Working with researchers at UC Davis and Kansas State, the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel offers a lexicon of coffee terms coming from “the frontiers of sensory science methods and analyses.” They described the process using technical language (“an Agglomerative Hierarchical Cluster (AHC) analysis was performed on the results from the sorting exercise to group the flavor attributes into different categories (or clusters) represented visually by a dendrogram”) (Sage 2016).

The flavor wheel ranges from Chamomile, Rose and Jasmine to Vegetative and Herblike to Petroleum, Skunk, and Pipe Tobacco. 

In order to calibrate such flavors, the accompaning guide gives references to ground a 0-15 scale of intensity. For example, one entry reads:

BLACKBERRY: The sweet, dark, fruity, floral, slightly sour, somewhat woody aromatic associated with blackberries

REFERENCE: Smucker’s Blackberry Jam

INTENSITY: 5.5

PREPARATION: Serve jam in a 1-ounce cup. Cover with a plastic lid.

Recently, among trendsetters there has been a shift in preference away from the more traditional deep, creamy chocolate flavors (and maple syrup, caramel, red wine) toward more floral and citrus notes.

The Cup of Excellence program has taken cupping standardization to the next level, as my colleague Bradley Wilson has observed. In Cup of Excellence competitions, each coffee will be blindly evaluated 5 times by different cuppers.  Only coffees that get consistently high scores advance in the competition, and out of hundreds of entrants each country will have 25-35 ranking winning coffees that are sold at a live internet auction.

Guatemala is ground zero for Third Wave coffee. This is due in part to its unique geographic and climatic endowments. High altitude coffees tend to command higher premiums, and Guatemala’s volcanic slopes and varied microclimates create a range of subtle flavors. But it was also visionaries such as Bill Hempstead, who as president and a director of the Guatemalan Coffee Association (Anacafé), promoted the branding of regional cup profiles which has led to the flourishing of single estate and micro-lot coffees.

Brazil's Middle Class and the Price of Coffee in New York

It looks like Brazil will surpass the U.S. this year as the world's biggest consumer of coffee. The Wall Street Journal reports that this is driving up global prices. Coffee futures (the "C price" as it is known in the trade) reached $1.95 a pound last Thursday, its highest since the price collapse in 2011. This is good news for the smallholding Maya farmers in Guatemala who produce high-altitude, high-quality coffees. (I have previously discussed high-end coffee and Maya farmers and the research carried out with Bart Victor.) 

It also reflects a change in global political and economic relations (as discussed here in more detail)--the rise of Brazil as a foreign aid donor, middle class consumer, and politically self-confident country.No longer just a supplier of the raw materials we need for our consumer goods, but a competitor driving up prices of consumer goods (coffee as well as Miami real estate), an emerging world power whose positions we need to engage and not assume we can dictate.

High-end Coffee and Maya Farmers in Guatemala

As with fine wine, provenance and terroir have become key elements of value in the world of high-end coffee. Like wine, coffee’s complex flavor profile is especially sensitive to climate, moisture, and soil conditions; and the highest priced coffees are varietals provenanced from single estates. In 2012, Korean buyers paid $500.50 a pound for a micro-lot of that year’s mocha varietal from the Guatemalan finca El Injerto (bought by YT Infinite, doing business as Brian's coffee). The entire lot was only 8 pounds, but the benchmark New York commodity price at the time was just about $170 per hundredweight, meaning that the El Injerto mocha sold for almost 300 times the going rate for washed arabicas.

I did not try this $500 coffee, but I have sampled a number of El Injerto’s more reasonable (if still pricey) alternatives. They produce my favorite coffee by far, with a deep, almost smoky, base and highlights of dark berries and citrus. Tastes vary, but by El Injerto holds its own with the very best. The owner of El Injerto, Arturo Aguirres, told me that until the late 1970s, they transported all of their coffee by mule, as they were no passable roads, and they he continued to plant the high altitude exotic varietals (Mocha, Pacamara, Maroquipe) even when they were not selling, because they were good coffees and he took pride in his coffee production. When others were switching their land to rubber and palm trees, Aguirres held out. And now it is paying off with the premiums his specialty coffees command. (See also Allison Aubrey's NPR piece on Journey of a Specialty Coffee Bean from Cherry to Cup.)

Are his coffees worth $6.60 a cup wholesale (and FOB Huehuetenango, Guatemala)? If it is what the market will bear, one could argue, then it seems that they must be. "Objective" quality (by established tasting standards) and market scarcity play an important role, but we cannot discount the symbolic values at play: the relative positioning of conspicuous consumption; the imagined, personal relationship with a producer (and his inspiring story); and underwriting it all, the cultural and market shift among the global affluent toward artisanal and singular products.  Yesterday, the NY Times reports on the consumption side of such coffees at high-end retailers such as Stumptown and Intelligensia. 

Throughout the twentieth century, coffee production in Guatemala was a highly concentrated industry composed of a small number of very large producers. These cafetaleros operated privately owned plantations (fincas) and depended on temporary, migrant labor to deliver what had become a high volume, low cost commodity product. The large producers traded with equally large and concentrated exporters and roasters who then completed the global value chain; this was the coffee that found its way into cups around the world as Folgers, Maxwell House, and hundreds of other brands. In the largely Maya highland communities where labor was recruited, working on coffee fincas was, and is, seen as employment of last resort because of the low wages and harsh conditions.

Today, we find a large number of former coffee laborers and subsistence farmers supporting their families by growing and selling their own coffee. The rapidly proliferating number of small producers—at least 50,000 new growers over the last 20 years, doubling the number of producers in Guatemala—has significantly altered the face of Guatemalan coffee. In the western highlands, the vast majority of these new producers are indigenous. They are cultivating increasingly differentiated varieties of high quality coffee on their own small parcels of land using family labor, and increasingly hiring day workers; a majority process and sell their coffee through a cooperative. Their production is sometimes sold as domain-specific varietals directly to small and medium sized roasters around the world rather than disappearing in vast, undifferentiated lots of commodity.

In a recent study, Bart Victor and I look at how coffee plays into the desires of Maya farmers for a better life.  Aguirres is not typical of the group—a ladino, relatively affluent, a third generation coffee farmer—but the prices his provenanced coffee commands dramatically illustrate the high end of this new market, and the potential for other farmers. El Injerto operates at the very upper end of the market, but the demand for quality and provenance has driven up prices for all of the high altitude Guatemalan producers, most of whom are today relatively smallholding Maya farmers.

There is dignity, many of these farmers told us, in working one’s own land, being one’s own boss, and they see coffee as a potentially lucrative way to keep their own production and be finically independent. They view seasonal plantation labor as a form of dependency, wrought with the hardships of being separated from one’s family, that they want to avoid if at all possible. They also prefer to hold wealth in land, and see coffee production as a way of expanding land holdings (or first time buying). The farmers we interviewed overwhelmingly want to get ahead, to achieve algo más in their lives, to see their children flourish, and they see coffee as a partial route to that. See Jennifer Johnston's piece on Consumer taste for high altitude beans shifts opportunity to small farmers.


We did our study in 2011, right after the March 31 peak New York C price of $298.93 (per hundredweight); two years later it has fallen to $135.43 (see price chart below).  At the same time the Coffee Rust fungus threatens large portions of Guatemalan production (estimates range from a drop of 15% to as high as 50% next year).  Price drops and coffee rust are certainly hitting the new entrant smallholders the hardest, and Bart and I hope to do follow up studies over the next year to see what impact this has had and farmers' livelihoods.

German Eggs, Guatemalan Coffee, and the Good Life

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German Eggs, Guatemalan Coffee, and the Good Life: An Anthropological Look at Markets, Values and Wellbeing (my new manuscript) presents a simple proposition: the ends of the economy, as well as politics, should be provisioning the good life for people as they themselves conceive it.  The rub is, of course, that while we may all want to live the good life, we differ widely on just what that entails.  The book examines wellbeing in two very different cultural contexts, teasing out lessons for the good life and how best to achieve it.   

We look to middle class German supermarket shoppers and to impoverished Maya farmers in Guatemala, uncovering how they use the market as consumers and as producers in pursuit of the good life.  In both places, the good life implies more than mere happiness: it implies wellbeing, fulfillment, the meaningful existence Aristotle termed eudaimonia.  An adequate income is absolutely necessary, but alone is insufficient, for overall wellbeing.  As other research has noted, health and physical security, family bonds and social relations are also important.  But my research points to several additional key elements of the good life that go beyond material standards of living:

·         Agency and Aspiration: Aspiration, a view of the future based on ideas about the good life, gives direction to agency, the power to act and to control one’s destiny 

·         Opportunity Structures: The will—agency—is alone not enough; there must also be a way, a set of structures (social, economic, legal) that provide real opportunities to realize one’s aspirations

·         Dignity and Fairness: The exact contours of “fairness” vary across cultures, but everywhere wellbeing depends on how one is treated in relation to others, socially as well as economically  

·         Commitment to a Meaningful Project: Having a purpose that is larger than one’s self provides a crucial sense of meaning to life; being a part of such larger projects is fundamental to wellbeing and the good life

I illustrate these themes through thick descriptions of German eggs and cars, Guatemalan coffee and cocaine—things to which people attach their aspirations and desires for a good life, both extraordinary and mundane. 

Buying eggs may be one of life’s more mundane tasks, something most of us do without much thought beyond occasionally comparing prices.  But egg shopping in Germany compels one to make an explicit moral decision with every purchase, to lay bare the price one puts on certain values.  Since 2004 Germany has required all eggs to carry a numeric code that denotes how the chickens were raised.  Among German shoppers we find a broad concern with the moral provenance of eggs, which they explain in terms of ecological conscientiousness and a salient cultural notion of social solidarity.  They see such consumer choices as a way of pursuing their vision of what the world should look like, of the good life for themselves and others.

 

While you may not have spent much time thinking about where yours eggs come from, there is a good chance that you have considered the origin of your coffee, if only to order the Antigua mild or Colombian blend at your coffee shop.  Much high-end gourmet coffee these days is grown by poor, smallholding Maya farmers in the highlands of Guatemala.  The high altitude lands to which they have been relegated over the centuries turns out to be ideally suited for producing the complexly flavored coffees preferred by today’s affluent consumers. These Maya farmers have entered the coffee market in pursuit of something better for themselves and their families, a productive if imperfect path for achieving their own visions of the good life.

In this book, we see how elements of wellbeing are expressed by German consumers and Maya producers, what this means for their visions of the good life, and what they can tell us about wellbeing. 

To understand what the good life could be calls for empirical study of how the world works (the “is”), but also a critical analysis of how things got that way and moral reflection about how the world might be different (the “ought”).  I conclude by suggesting a “positive anthropology” that works between the is and the ought, documenting the ways people around the world conceive of and work toward wellbeing to glean practical as well as theoretical lessons for approaching the good life. 

The entire manuscript draft is available (in A4 format if you are printing) at tedfischer.org/assets/German_Eggs_Guatemalan_Coffee_and_the_Good_Life_A4.pdf and I would welcome comments.