Cultivating Curiosity | 25, Issue 21
Despite entering my sixth year of editing 25, I’m (somehow) still astonished at the organic way the editorial team often ends up with some kind of unifying link between all the features despite our best efforts to avoid any “theming” at the start of each cycle.
This issue is not connected by virtue of the relationships between the different topics it covers, but rather by the depth of questions asked by each feature, and the complexity of the variables they contain. Each of these features feels like an entire microcosm in and of itself, a rabbit hole of specialized information specific to the topic at hand. Together, they reflect our industry’s attempt to make sense of the increasingly rapid rate of change we all face and the ways in which it will impact our personal and collective futures.
Across Business and Sustainability, Judy Ganes and Andrés Montenegro both explore the concept of market dynamics and value distribution through two very different lenses: the rules underpinning the Intercontinental Exchange’s (ICE’s) “C” market and the Specialty Coffee Association’s (SCA’s) recent Equitable Value Distribution survey, respectively. In Research, two groups of collaborative researchers outline Coffee Science Foundation projects with vastly different scopes of work. Whether focused on creating a more robust lexicon for roast color or mitigating the generation of static electricity during grinding, these features help us to better understand the scientific foundations of emerging standards and best practices.
In Insight, Mateus Manfrin Artêncio and Alexa Romano deep-dive into their areas of respective study, too. Where one explores the role of informational attributes on coffee professionals’ sensory perception and outlines the concept of “the predictive brain,” the other considers the history of coffee consumption and questions whether consumers are passive receivers or active co-creators of value. There are certainly links between Artêncio’s and Romano’s work as a pair, but it’s also possible to draw threads between these Insight features and those in Business, Sustainability, and Research: what role does information play in coffee’s system when it comes to market dynamics, value distribution, professional standards, and best practices?
With all these intensely deep features exploring their own respective fields, perhaps there is no better issue to explore how the Coffee Science Foundation sets its research agenda. In Program Spotlight, Mary Basco explains not only the agenda’s development process, but also what new knowledge we hope it will yield in the coming years.
Although there’s a density to Issue 21’s features, each rich with detail specific to its focus, there are also many connections to find between each, reading between the lines. There’s so much to be excited about and grateful for when it comes to the way in which our industry interrogates and explores all these vastly different areas of study in service of making coffee better.
JENN RUGOLO
Editor, 25
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 21. This issue of 25 is made possible with the contributions of specialty coffee businesses who support the activities of the Specialty Coffee Association through its underwriting and sponsorship programs. Learn more about our underwriters here.