Brazil’s multiple coffee markets: an ethnographic study of coffee production from family growers to coffee gourmets

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article contributes to the studies of “multiple markets” based on ethnographic reflections on the process of singularization of the coffee market in southeastern Brazil. Our discussion is based on two different in-field investigations that happened separately and at different times and places, compared here with the purpose of mapping the multiple coffee markets in terms of the valuation frameworks that are used by a family-based agriculture production and by tasting specialists of specialty coffee. Looking at these instances of coffee valuation, we investigate different attempts to increase the coffee value in the marketplace by emphasizing local traditions and values or by producing an objectively refined value coffee. Nevertheless, we argue that both sites produce frameworks to construct coffee value through future projections of commercialization, defined here as an analytical mechanism for the identification of “multiple markets” that have not been noticed by the current specialized literature yet.