A Long and Winding Road | 25, Issue 18
On a very basic level, we all know that our present actions are the seeds of our future—but it can be easy to forget the exact steps you took to get to where you are, unless you deliberately stop to mentally retrace them.
Much of this issue is consumed with some of the questions we’ve been grappling with as an organization and as an industry over the past year—but there are some direct, serendipitous links between three seemingly unrelated features, only visible now that the work is in an advanced stage. A research feature, by Dr. Jorge Berny and Dr. Mario Fernández-Alduenda, shares initial results of a study to understand how cuppers cup, a part of a longer-term project to evaluate and evolve the existing SCA cupping protocol. One important component of the evolution project was the updated, attributes-based definition of specialty coffee we released in 2021—a definition informed by our work with Dr. Carlos Carpio and his team, who have also contributed to this issue’s research section. Before they could begin their work to understand the labor dynamics of specialty coffee farmworkers in El Salvador and Honduras, they faced a difficult question: what makes a specialty farm “specialty”? Answering that question required us to think about the meaning of specialty coffee to different actors in the coffee system, and this issue’s program spotlight explains more about how we’re integrating this logic into the SCA’s Coffee Value Assessment System. Together, these features offer different vantage points on the long, complicated road the SCA travels in fulfilling our purpose: to make specialty coffee a thriving, sustainable, and equitable activity for all actors.
The remainder of this issue offers tools for the industry to use as we continue to forge a path toward a shared understanding of the value of coffee’s many different attributes, a journey we more explicitly began at this year’s Re:co Symposium in Boston. For example, there’s no doubt that our collective interest in “sustainability”—whether directly related to the coffee we’re drinking or the company who sold, roasted, or brewed it—continues to increase, especially as the climate crisis escalates. But do we have a shared understanding of what it is (or entails)? First, Kellem Emanuele offers us a much-needed coffee-focused primer on the history, meaning, and business application of the abbreviation “ESG,” a term often (and incorrectly) used interchangeably with “sustainability.” Later, anthropologist Dr. Sarah Grant highlights the myth of a singular “sustainability” as she traces the difficulty of translating its concept and framework into cultural contexts outside of the US and Europe, where the term was popularized. These features articulate some of the complexity we face in adapting our existing approaches for the emerging future.
And, finally, across research and insight, features from Professor Christopher Hendon and Mateus Manfrin Artêncio offer fascinating glimpses of our journey to comprehend some of coffee’s more complicated intrinsic and extrinsic attributes through unlikely tools. While Professor Hendon uses electrochemistry to unlock the secrets of espresso extraction, Mateus Manfrin Artêncio employs electroencephalography (EEG) to read the brainwaves of coffee tasters and measure their reactions to coffee served with and without extrinsic information.
If the seeds of our future are indeed sewn in the writing and reading of this issue’s features, I cannot wait for the moment ahead where we stop and look back to trace the stretch of road that we are only now starting to travel.
JENN RUGOLO
Editor, 25
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 18. This issue of 25 is made possible with the contributions of specialty coffee businesses who support the activities of the Specialty Coffee Association through its underwriting and sponsorship programs. Learn more about our underwriters here.