Competitive Coffee Making and the Crafting of the Ideal Barista

Abstract

Despite widespread attention to issues of gender and economic exploitation at coffee's agricultural origins, works within coffee scholarship systematically overlook the workers at the final stage of production: baristas, the coffee shop employees who prepare and serve beverages. This article draws from data collected from over four hundred female American specialty coffee baristas to examine how their gender impacts their experiences at coffee competitions. I argue that barista competitions exist in order to legitimize the barista as a type of skilled laborer, but that these attempts rest on highly gendered understandings of skill, professionalism, and performance. Barista competitions attempt to present a unified industry face, but gender remains a salient issue through its unequal presence that renders female baristas as distinct and different from the ideal barista, who is assumed to be male. The conclusions drawn from this case study have broad significance for our understandings of gender and precariousness in the food industry, and the relationship between, and negotiation of, skill and perceived value. The rarefied world of specialty coffee competition magnifies and illuminates extant workplace issues regarding gender, which are characteristic of many forms of low-wage service labor in the United States.

A Practice Perspective on Market Evolution: How Craft and Commercial Coffee Firms Expand Practices and Develop Markets

“…Performing aesthetic engagement demands knowledge and skills. Craft practitioners, therefore, seek to develop their expertise (Bhide 2008; Parrish 2020). For example, they use institutional materials that support aesthetic engagement, such as the SCAA’s sensory lexicon, which “identifies 110 flavor, aroma, and texture attributes present in coffee, and provides references for measuring their intensity” (World Coffee Research 2021).…”

“…Translation efforts contributed to the diffusion of meanings by adapting them to align with broader targets. For example, the professionalization of baristas that accompanied their aesthetic engagement with practices and display of masterful performances (Parrish 2020) contributed to the creation and diffusion of meanings such as “professional barista,” “coffee connoisseur,” and “handcrafted coffee” (for an evolution of these terms over the years, see Figure 3). As craft baristas professionalized, they and the coffee shops they worked at became associated with snobbery due to gatekeeping behaviors, exemplified by parodies in cultural work (e.g., Portlandia 's “The Coffee Manifesto”), which led to the growth of meanings such as “coffee snob.” These cultural caricatures could have devalued craft performances (Arsel and Thompson 2011) and limited the diffusion of craft meanings to a target broader than coffee connoisseurs, but they did not.…”

“…The market meaning system was also enriched. Originally a simple way of making coffee, pourover-making became the benchmark practice for brewing a perfect cup of coffee (Boydell 2019), a meaning diffused through YouTube videos with millions of views such as “Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Coffee” and “Vice Journey to Coffee Mecca: Munchies Presents LA Coffee.” Pourover-making performances by craft practitioners also contributed to the professionalization of baristas as skilled artisans who possess the expertise to properly brew coffee and who readily know how to make such decisions (see also Parrish 2020). More generally, the practice became a ubiquitous performance at craft coffee shops (Boydell 2019).…”

Barista Diary: An autoethnography studying the operational experience of third-wave coffee shop baristas

“…478-479). Instead, Ott (2020) implies that a "true" barista is one who appreciates the manual craftsmanship that goes into the brew process: one embraces coffeemaking as a form of artistry (Laurier, 2013;Lee, 2021a;Parrish, 2020). Adopting Ott's definition of a "true" barista, we define a barista as an F&B operative in the third-wave coffee shop industry who is primarily responsible for the crafting and serving of specialty coffee beverages.…”

“…Researchers deem the barista profession as creative, promising, and superior in job quality. For example, Knox (2016Knox ( , 2019 and Parrish (2020) assert that baristas entail artistically gratifying work, vast growth opportunities, better pay, and higher self-regulated agencies-qualities that do not match up to other sectors of the F&B industry-making them a unique group that both academia and practice could learn from.…”