Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how specialty coffee aficionados resident in São Paulo negotiate definitions and imaginaries of product origin to access the high-quality international coffees they desire and which help them accrue status in the local coffee consumer scene.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the centrality of product origin in the specialty coffee consumer community and examines how it is experienced and symbolically consumed as an essential part of field-dependent cultural capital. The concept of ‘origin,’ as it is understood in the specialty coffee industry, is a key term in product differentiation and part of the definition of specialty coffee itself. However, considering it as a symbolic imaginary that is central to the experience of ‘doing’ specialty coffee, differences emerge in the creation and maintenance of such imaginaries, with respect to particular local contexts. I take as my case study the community of specialty coffee drinkers in São Paulo, Brazil—an urban group of 'hip' connoisseur consumers whose consumption landscape is shaped by being located in the largest coffee-producing nation in the world. Drawing on ethnographic work with these passionate consumers, I show how international trade structures maintain Brazilian consumers on the periphery of the transnational, commodity-specific consumer culture of specialty coffee, and reinforces their unequal participation in the ‘orthodox’ origin discourses negotiated and defined by coffee-importing nations. In particular, the relative lack of distance (both social and geographic) between coffee producers and consumers in Brazil and the practical difficulties that prevent Brazilians from easily and directly accessing coffee from other producing nations (rather than via importing nations, where it is roasted and returned to Brazil) transforms the shape of moral geographic imaginations, how status is accrued, and how 'cool' is negotiated between local participants in the specialty coffee scene.