\"The voice of this coffee\": Negotiating the moral economy of specialty coffee in professional barista competitions

As Davids (2013) has argued, specialty coffee has been represented as morally and aesthetically superior to mass-produced coffee. These discourses of superiority emerge from an industry emphasis on personal relationships with coffee farmers, micro-lot production, and production models that focus on and support the wellbeing of the coffee producing community. The barista, a central figure in the industry, serves as the interface between consumers and these moral evaluative economies at other levels of the supply chain. In the specialty coffee movement, baristas are seen as skilled artisans and professionals dedicated to their craft. Allen (2013) has attributed the development of this view in part to the growth of professional barista competitions in which baristas compete on a national or international level to craft world class drinks for a panel of judges. This paper investigates the narratives at the core of these competitions and highlights how baristas incorporate a polyphony of voices (Bakhtin 1981) from other levels in the coffee supply chain into their competition performance. The emergence of the voice of the farmer, the picker, or the roaster entails the acknowledgement by the industry of the moral authority and expert status of these individuals. However, their authority remains heavily mediated by the barista. In drawing on these voices, I argue that baristas strategically utilize the moral authority that these voices represent as a form of discursive support for their own professional performances (Goffman 1959) and relationship to the larger moral evaluative regimes that the specialty coffee industry values.