"Can you make coffee wrong, anyway?" : An Ethnographic Analysis of the Coffee Culture in Lewisburg, PA
Author:
Elizabeth Hoffman ’24Co-Authors:
Faculty Mentor(s):
Professor Allen Tran, AnthropologyProfessor Jonathan Scholnick, Anthropology
Funding Source:
The Tom Greaves Fund for Research and Curricular Development, Program for Undergraduate ResearchAbstract
The “three waves” of coffee describe the growing importance of unique flavors and sourcing in order to best satisfy an increasingly sophisticated palate in coffee consumption. These allude to people’s preferences for different kinds of coffee: third wave roasters emphasize the importance of traceability with their coffee beans, which in turn adds a level of education that is often referred to as the “coffee geek subculture”. Conversely, the first wave does not rely on quality in order to sell, but rather on coffee as a mass product that delivers caffeine to its consumers. The second wave, then, intersects these two extremes, and relies on chain coffee houses to create more individualized coffee drinks, though they do not focus on value orientation of the product as heavily as third wave enthusiasts. My project examines the manifestation of these three waves in Lewisburg’s coffee scene. I conducted interviews with both producers and consumers who live in our town to learn about whether or not their own coffee consumption intersects the three waves. Through this, I discovered a similar value-oriented system that distinguishes coffee consumers from one another: in Lewisburg, a person’s consumption habits are driven by either a social, ethical, or economic value orientation. In this thesis, I analyze the three wave typology to challenge current understandings of coffee culture in the United States.