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.

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.

Today’s SCA Cupping Protocol and the SCA Cupping Form are among the most used tools of the coffee industry, applied daily by thousands of people around the world, serving actors across coffee’s vast and complex value-generating system.

Originating in the early 2000s as an acronym to capture non-financial areas connected to business performance, the term ESG—short for “environmental, social, and governance”—has become significantly more visible over time. While the term now appears in mainstream outlets more often than it did a decade ago, many people are still unclear on what it really means, how it differs from or aligns with sustainability, and its potential relevance for their own organizations. KELLEM EMANUELE offers an ESG primer tailored for the coffee industry.

The word “sustainability” is everywhere, but do we really know—or agree on—what it means? Professor SARAH GRANT explains why, despite its difficulty, understanding “sustainability” as a framework is a worthwhile endeavor, especially in understanding culturally relative perspectives and the power relations inherent in the promotion of sustainable coffee.

Dr. JORGE BERNY and Dr. MARIO FERNÁNDEZ-ALDUENDA share initial results of a collaborative study examining how cuppers cup and exploring the potential impacts of a proposed component of the reengineered cupping protocol.

Professors CARLOS CARPIO, PhD and LUIS SANDOVAL, PhD worked with BRENDA MAMANI, MSc to ask: what are the living wages in El Salvador and Honduras, and how would current total costs and profitability of coffee production be affected if farmworkers were paid living wages?

Assistant Professor CHRISTOPHER H. HENDON shares the theory underpinning an ongoing Coffee Science Foundation research project, supported by Simonelli Group, toward deepening our understanding of espresso extraction.

Corresponding author MATEUS MANFRIN ARTÊNCIO shares the findings of a recent paper, “A Cup of Black Coffee with GI, please! Evidence of Geographical Indication Influence on a Coffee Tasting Experiment,” published in Physiology & Behavior, confirming the significant influence an extrinsic attribute like a geographical indication has on consumers’ tasting.

Issue 17 may feel like an odd milestone for a publication named 25, but it coincides with our rapidly approaching fifth anniversary, both as a publication and as a unified organization.

Our industry is characterized by creative, free spirits, passionate about expressing themselves through coffee—which is why the word “standard” is not always well received. Dr. MARIO FERNANDEZ-ALDUENDA explains the checks and balances of the SCA’s new standards development system.

Corresponding author Dr. SELENA AHMED outlines the findings of a systematic review of research conducted to better understand climate change’s impact on coffee quality, what prompted the review, and what we need to research next.