The Life of a Cup of Coffee, as Told by Sabine Parrish

As I prepare for my Zoom call with Sabine Parrish, an anthropologist of coffee, I consider the inescapable irony of speaking on a digital platform with someone who studies material culture.

Sitting in the United States, I take in my own steaming mug of coffee, far across the ocean from Sabine in her home in Cardiff, Wales. Only I can smell this coffee, which took a physical and material journey to my cup that I will never understand in its entirety. To me, it’s just Trader Joe’s Organic Sumatra Coffee (medium-dark roast; “smooth, earthy notes”), the labor of many, packaged and appropriated into five or six words consisting of a brand, a method, a country, and the name of a commodity. This is what Sabine studies—but in particular, specialty coffee, a term that refers to the coffee of the “highest grade,” regulated at every step of the supply chain.

I met Sabine a few years ago, in her course on the anthropology of coffee, while I was granted the opportunity to study abroad for a term at the University of Oxford. She is nearly complete with her doctoral degree in anthropology; very soon, she’ll be Dr. Parrish. Since then, whenever I make or buy coffee, I think of this time when my own relationship to coffee was drastically transformed.

On Zoom, Sabine greets me, and I finally ask what I’ve always wanted to ask. Which came first: coffee or anthropology?

“Coffee came first, but completely incidentally,” she says. While working as a barista at a specialty coffee shop during her university years, she received a sexist comment from a customer related to the espresso machine she was using. For Sabine, this experience sparked a curiosity beyond that of the unsavory interaction, and got her thinking about experiences in the coffee company workplace. She then began her initial phases of master’s degree fieldwork in the Seattle area, where she grew up.

Homing in on the coffee industry, Sabine looked at gender disparities in tipping practices, employee advancement, and those selected to participate in barista competitions. It quickly became a part of her identity: “It just spun out of control. At some point someone was like, ‘Oh, she’s the one that does research on coffee. Ask her about that!’”

Sabine mentions that when she was a teenager, she made a promise to her best friend—who is Brazilian—to learn Portuguese. Now, she has lived in Brazil on and off for over a decade, as her personal commitment blossomed into an essential part of her work.

We talk about her ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, the world’s largest producer of coffee, and I pat myself on the back a little for remembering. Sabine then underscores my fatal flaw, noting that Brazil recently surpassed the United States as the largest consumer of coffee by country, yet Brazil is “still very much represented as a producer in academic literature.”

She pulls up a whiteboard to show me the outline of her dissertation, the title in purple block print and the chapters in neat black cursive. A lot of her research consisted of working as a barista and “just loitering in three different coffee shops across São Paulo.” One coffee shop in particular became a lively hub as one of the only places open on a Sunday, where baristas and coffee professionals would gather on their days off.

Sabine explains that the boundary between work and research was challenging at times. While making clear that the shop was always her first priority, she often had to reiterate that she was also there to conduct research. However, her identity in the coffee shop transformed over time in unique and wonderful ways: “At first, people would be like, ‘Oh, that’s Sabine the anthropologist—Sabine a anthropóloga.’ And then, after a point: ‘Oh, that’s Sabine, the one who embroiders’—because I’d always take embroidery.”

I ask how her relationship to coffee has changed over the course of her research. “I have become far less of a coffee snob,” she laughs. Becoming so intimately acquainted with the coffee commodity chain shifted Sabine’s values regarding specialty coffee. Understanding where the coffee came from and the process by which it arrived into her cup made the specialty coffee grading less crucial to her enjoyment. She notes that there is still an obsession with the highest graded coffee in the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of mainland Europe—Germany, in particular.

Anecdotally, Sabine’s words ring true. I think of the few months I lived in Hamburg—the Kaffeeklatsch often right up there with the Feierabend. I later learned that two coffee shops I frequented sold specialty coffee. One proudly announces on its website that they “want to make the art of making coffee accessible to everyone. Smell. Taste. Feel. Coffee for all the senses. Come with us on our journey!”

I ask how her relationship to coffee has changed over the course of her research. “I have become far less of a coffee snob,” she laughs.

It reminds me of how Sabine gave me a much-needed awakening to the hidden-in-plain-sight aesthetics and rhetoric of American coffee culture. Starbucks declares its history as its “heritage,” and its coffees are from locations “home to some of the world’s most exotic flavors.” Its Brazil Latin American Blend, part of Starbucks’ “Premium Select Collection,” is a “full body of Brazilian coffee” resulting in an “inviting cup with delicate notes of maple, vanilla, and toasted nuts.” They don’t want you to have a coffee. They want you to have a luxurious experience, frequently built upon questionable language.

For Sabine, the exotification and elite commodification of coffee, whether qualitatively or quantitatively, is troubling. In order to be considered specialty coffee, it must be given a score of at least eighty points out of a hundred (with rigorous standards set by the Specialty Coffee Association), graded by a certified taster (credentialed by the Coffee Quality Institute). Now, there are even specialty coffee standards for every step of the coffee making process, right until it reaches the cup. While a coffee that’s graded eighty-three points may seem lacking in comparison to a coffee that’s ninety-three points, Sabine notes that the eighty-three-point coffee is still extremely good.

Nonetheless, specialty coffees that are given a higher grade are immediately more attractive to buyers, typically American and European, who can afford to pay top dollar. This leaves lower-graded specialty coffees to be most commonly served in shops in the Global South writ large, just like the places at which Sabine worked in São Paulo.

But while a coffee farmer likely gets paid more to sell to a foreign buyer rather than to a domestic one, “the really good coffee goes pretty much outbound from south to north. It doesn’t circulate within the south. It doesn’t come back.” Through her work, Sabine calls for this to change: “Consumers in the Global South absolutely have a right to the best coffees from their nations, their sister nations, from wherever they want it as well.”

The roots of inequality grow deeper still, right into the sensory experience of coffee itself. Sabine runs off and returns with a book titled O Poder Caro do Limão, holding it up to the camera: “Welcome to my new favorite book—The Curative Power of the Lime.” The cover is delightfully adorned with both lemons and limes. As if reading my mind, she explains, “Lemons and limes—they’re not separate fruit in Brazil. They’re two kinds of limes.” In Brazil, they’re both called limão.

Her passion for the matter grows as she presents the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel, a vibrant depiction sorted into three layers. Each layer boasts a range of interesting flavor descriptors like “green/vegetative” and “nutty/cocoa” (the innermost layer), “papery/musty” and “dried fruit” (the middle layer), and “skunky,” “isovaleric acid,” “prune,” and “meaty/brothy” (the outermost layer).

According to the Specialty Coffee Association website, the Wheel was created by “dozens of professional sensory panelists, scientists, coffee buyers, and roasting companies.” Sabine gives the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel due credit. “It’s an awesome tool for controlled, lab-based things,” she says, “when everybody who is using it has these references.”

However, she explains that in Brazil, it quickly became hard to use due to the lack of distinction between lemons and limes. “You start really getting into cultural differences of the senses,” she says. The “most collaborative piece of research of coffee flavor ever completed” was clearly missing a crucial lens: that of consumers outside of the United States and Western Europe. “I’ve been in an ongoing battle with lemon and lime for a while,” Sabine jokes.

The “most collaborative piece of research of coffee flavor ever completed” was clearly missing a crucial lens: that of consumers outside of the United States and Western Europe

Notably, the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel was first published in 1995 by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. It later unified with the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe to become the Specialty Coffee Association in 2017, bringing together two large, wealthy specialty coffee communities. It gets at what Sabine characterizes as a form of “sensory exclusion” in an industry that “purports to be a global community.” The Coffee Flavor Taster’s Wheel acts as a metonym for the coffee industry writ large—exclusion and unequal access are brewed directly into its foundations.

There is a Portuguese version of the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel, which I find graciously posted online, bypassing the $9.99 I’d have to shell out to the Specialty Coffee Association. Lemon is listed as limão siciliano; another related search reveals discussions in Portuguese about learning the difference between that and a limão taiti—at least in Brazil, they are all limões.

From the micro to the macro, coffee culture reveals its complicated underbelly. On one hand, there are competitions on the global stage such as the World Barista Championship. A competition like this opens doors and legitimizes the barista—“a precarious, hourly food service job”—as an active participant in the coffee-making process.

On the other hand, disparities linger at every level. Over twenty years of competitions, only the most recent two winners have been women, one from Poland and the other from South Korea. (Cumulatively, there have been ten winners from Western Europe and Scandinavia, five from East Asia and Australia, two from the United States, and one each from Poland, Guatemala, and El Salvador.) But while the spark for Sabine’s life of coffee may have begun from the perspective of gender, she has also begun to study other forms of structural inequality.

She pauses to explain what prompted this shift. Sabine has had the opportunity to work as a behind-the-scenes coordinator for barista competitions, additionally serving as a judge for the National Brazilian Barista Championship. In 2019, she also worked on the prep team for the Brazilian national champion, translating her speech into English and helping with coaching. When the competitor reached the World Barista Championship semifinals for the first time in a decade, Sabine began to question the whole system. “Why is Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, doing so badly [at the Championship]? What’s going on here? Why are there so few competitors from the Global South?”

Only baristas representing two producing nations, Guatemala and El Salvador, have won. The rest have been from coffee-importing countries. “That is where the power lies,” Sabine declares. “But, as we go forward, I really want to see that balance shift.”

In fact, Sabine is crafting her own way through coffee. In December 2019, with her husband and their best friend, she opened Mec (a French slang word roughly for “dude,” honoring one of the trio’s inside jokes), a small coffee shop in central Cardiff, on the upper floor of a Victorian arcade, which has the energy of a small portal back in time.

Across from the cozy, unassuming Mec was a natural wine shop right across the balcony, which closed in September 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. When the unit went up for rent, the trio thought, “Well, what if we opened a wine shop?”

“This is a very unreasonable thing to do in the middle of a pandemic, Olivia,” she tells me jokingly. “I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.”

Both shops currently deliver twice a week in greater Cardiff and by mail within the UK. Keeping with the French theme, they named the wine shop Bulles, the French word for “bubbles”—and also an homage to the manager’s last name, Bull.

“Because we are a natural wine shop,” Sabine clarifies, “there’s a very minimal sort of amount of fizz, even if it’s not a champagne or a deliberately fizzy drink.”

Along with having poured her soul into drink shops of our culinary dreams, she admits, “I’ve been practicing pouring wine at home.” She waits patiently to (re)open and greet (returning) customers to both Mec and Bulles as the Welsh government continues to adjust public health restrictions in 2021.

When I ask about Covid life in the UK, I learn that she has her own ethnographic way of making sense of things during the pandemic. Currently, she works in an Oxford research group tracking eating behaviors and physical activity changes during the first round of lockdowns in England.

“I want things to go back to normal, and I want to be back to normal for a lot of reasons, my own teaching included,” she explains. Sabine also serves as a volunteer worker at mass vaccination centers in Cardiff as her own contribution toward post-Covid life.

But then she grows quieter, sharing a more personal reason. “My father died last year,” she says. “We still haven’t been able to have a funeral. We haven’t been able to do any of these things. As soon as I saw that I could volunteer for this, I thought, ‘I don’t want a single family to have to go through that.’”

As an anthropologist, Sabine is acutely aware of the pandemic’s heavy disruptions of daily life and of everyday habits that ground us. She’s ready to teach in person again and ready to go back to the beautiful mundanity of life. She says, “It’s really a sort of anthropological situation where I was like, ‘I want our rituals to come back.’” Now, I understand how rituals of coffeemaking, too, keep her—and perhaps many of us—going.

In that anthropology of coffee course, I recall her offering us all some coffee in the morning, her lost suitcase and equipment having arrived after an international trip. We greedily marched in for a taste of a coffee expert’s coffee, grateful for a change from instant coffee with water hastily heated in the microwave. Sabine’s fancy pour-over glass coffeemaker and care in her pseudo-barista role made it feel like something truly special. We didn’t care what the coffee was; it was the acts of pouring it, drinking it, and enjoying it that made it worth the while.

However, despite Sabine’s love for coffee and perpetually being the most caffeinated person on the block, she will sometimes turn to tea as her beverage of choice. “I’m drowning in coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee all the time. I’ll have a little tea, and I’ll be really calm,” she jokes. For Sabine, a small respite from coffee just makes the glorious return even better.

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