The rite of passage from regular to connoisseur consumer: the role of the taste transformation ritual in the specialty coffee context

Although the consumer culture field has addressed the role ritual plays in consumption, defining and describing this construct and explaining its dimensions, cultural meanings, elements, components, and practices, as well as revealing the differentiation in consumer practices, no research has yet identified how consumers, through ritual practices, establish and manipulate their own differentiation from other consumers during their rite of passage from one cultural category of person to another. Drawing on key concepts from ritual theory, my research addresses the role played by ritual in connoisseurship consumption. Conducting an ethnographic study on connoisseurship in specialty coffee consumption, I immersed myself in the field, visiting and observing consumers in high-end independent coffee shops in North America—Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, and New York—from August 2013 to July 2014. I also immersed myself in the Brazilian specialty coffee field, in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo, from August 2014 to January 2015, to compare and contrast the specialty coffee consumption cultures of Brazil, the United States, and Canada. I used long interviews, participant observation, netnography, introspection, and historical newspaper analysis to collect the data, which was then interepreted using a hermeneutic approach, comparing consumers’ stages in their connoisseurship rites of passage. To extend my understanding of connoisseurship consumption, I also collected data from the wine consumption context. In this dissertation, I introduce the idea of the taste transformation ritual, theorizing the process as a connoisseurship rite of passage, which converts regular consumers into connoisseur consumers. My research reveals that connoisseur consumers are amateurs in different stages of the connoisseurship rite of passage. They transform themselves by establishing and reinforcing the oppositions between mass and connoisseurship consumption. The taste transformation ritual involves the following elements: (1) variation in the choices of high-quality products, (2) the place to perform the tasting, (3) the moment of tasting, (4) the tasting act, (5) time and money investment, (6) increased subcultural and social capital, and (7) perseverance on the rite of passage. Connoisseur consumers participate in the connoisseurship consumption community. This heterogeneous community is composed of outstanding professionals, connoisseurs, and regular consumers. The forces that drive the community, as identified in this study, are the production of subcultural and social capital, emulation of professional and ritual consumption practices, enactment tensions between the community members, commercial friendship, and status games. I develop a broader theoretical account that builds on and extends a number of concepts regarding ritual consumption, taste, heterogeneous community, and connoisseur consumers.

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