We’re never entirely sure what the future holds, but the past few years have made it feel particularly unpredictable.

The Specialty Coffee Association is the world’s largest coffee membership association, with a sustainability-driven purpose deeply ingrained in its structure as a non-profit trade organization: to make coffee better.

Anthropology Professor EDWARD F. FISCHER, author of Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third- Wave Tastemakers Create Value, explains the different types of value, ways of determining worth, and how we create economic value by drawing on other sorts of values (moral, social, political, and other cultural values) through the lens of his fieldwork in Guatemala.

Anthropologist SARAH BESKY, PhD considers the relationship between tea’s sensory lexicon and ideas of quality across tea’s colonial history and current-day trading practices, highlighting that quality is far from an objective measure—and that it must be constantly reproduced in practice, including how we choose and use words to adjudicate quality over time.

CHERYL HUNG, lead researcher for the NCA's National Coffee Data Trends studies, traces the impact of the pandemic on coffee consumption in the US and Canada, highlights the collective urge to reconnect, and calls for the coffee community to focus on marketing the emotional benefits and the “softer” aspects of America’s favorite morning beverage.

Lead author Dr. MACKENZIE BATALI shares the results of a controlled and systematic study exploring the impact of the cold brew process on the sensory profile of the beverage it produces, recently published in MDPI’s open access journal, Foods.

Corresponding author HELEN VAIKMA shares the results of a study market mapping the sensory attributes of five different categories of plant-based beverages.

VAUGHN TAN highlights where uncertainty (which is not the same thing as risk) exists within specialty coffee’s supply chain, and questions whether the industry’s previous emphasis on the “direct” in “direct trade,” combined with a drive to rebuild leaner coffee supply chains, has had unintended side effects.