Hacer el sabor del café: Etnografía sobre la producción de significados en torno al café especial en tiendas especializadas, tostadoras y marcas de café, en Bogotá y Chía

Abstract

In this thesis he sought to reflect, from the producers' perspective, how specialty coffee is understood and how practices that involve sensory analysis are used for its promotion. These new meanings for coffee, and the precise focus given to the sensory, are relevant to the work that I set out to do. When I started this research, I had a singular interest in the way in which the taste for specialty coffee is built and legitimized in the places where barista and cupping take place. These experiences inevitably pass through the senses, that is, they are experiences that go through people's bodies. This concern triggered the following question: How is the consumption of specialty coffee related to particular forms of production, construction of meanings and tastes in today's Colombian society? For an adequate analysis of this concern, this work has been divided into two parts: the first analyzes the issue of production and the meanings of coffee; the second will deal with the subject of taste, its acquisition and use. In the initial part of the first chapter I show that coffee is a representative food and that this, in part, is articulated with the diversity of forms and particularities of this bean. In the next section I want to highlight what the actors are understanding about coffee under the logic of terroir. To achieve this, I contextualize coffee in Colombia, exposing the different forms it takes: the type of coffee, production and the areas of the country where it is found. The following parts concentrate on showing what the term specialty coffees refers to, and the reasons for producing it. I continue with a description of the production process of this food, and then I show how this is tied to ways of understanding the organoleptic depending on the place of origin. This way of understanding the taste and smells of coffee is encapsulated in a term known as Terroir.