Tasting Coff

Kenneth Liberman's study looks at how professional coffee tasters in more than a dozen countries put their sensory impressions into words, and how they turn those personal impressions into knowledge others can use. Combining ethnography with phenomenology, the book follows coffee through its whole international production chain, pausing at each stage to examine the tasting practices of the people who handle and sell it.

The descriptions are grounded in ethnomethodology, with close attention to how these participants actually discover and name coffee's flavors. The book also examines the methods and protocols of sensory science in their everyday details, which makes it a contribution to the sociology of science. Drawing on a decade of research in fourteen countries, Liberman offers a nonessentialist account of coffee's nature, history, and production, and treats the coffee world as a small-scale model that reveals and clarifies many features of contemporary human life.

The work engages the ideas of Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Aron Gurwitsch, and Harold Garfinkel, and its real-world cases sharpen and extend those thinkers' concepts. The book won the 2023 Distinguished Book Award from the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis section of the American Sociological Association.