EP 1067 Part 2 of 5 | What Does "Specialty Coffee" Mean Anymore? (Ian Fretheim) Map It Forward
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Episode Description
This is Part 2 of a five-part series with Ian Fretheim, Director of Sensory Analysis at Cafe Imports.
Across this series of The Daily Coffee Pro Podcast by Map It Forward, Lee Safar and Ian Fretheim explore one of the coffee industry's most important questions: What is quality coffee?
After questioning how the industry defines quality in Part 1, this conversation turns to another term that has become increasingly difficult to define: specialty coffee.
For decades, "specialty coffee" has served as the industry's shorthand for quality. But as processing methods evolve, market expectations shift, and businesses throughout the supply chain pursue different goals, the meaning of the term has become less clear.
Lee and Ian explore whether specialty coffee still represents a useful category or whether it has gradually become a label that different people interpret in completely different ways.
The discussion examines how quality, value and purpose intersect, and why trying to force every coffee into a single definition may no longer reflect the reality of today's industry. They also consider how producers, importers, roasters and cafés often use the same words while meaning very different things.
Rather than arguing for abandoning specialty coffee as a concept, this episode asks whether the industry would benefit from being more precise about the language it uses and the assumptions that language creates.
If quality coffee is becoming more contextual, perhaps the industry's most recognisable label needs to evolve alongside it.
Connect with Ian Fretheim here: