Liberman2024a

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Liberman2024a
BibType ARTICLE
Key Liberman2024a
Author(s) Kenneth Liberman
Title Differences in the situated work of professional tasters and sensory scientists
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Michael Lynch
Publisher
Year 2024
Language English
City
Month
Journal Ethnographic Studies
Volume 20
Number
Pages 163-177
URL Link
DOI 10.26034/lu.ethns.2024.6918
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

Both the work of sensory scientists and the work of professional coffee tasters involve using taste descriptors, lexicons, and tasting protocols; however, a twelve-year study of tasters in fourteen countries revealed that scientists and professional tasters do different things with them. Sensory scientists are oriented to fixing and maintaining unities of identity for the taste descriptors they use, and they seek to establish a universal applicability for them. Professional tasters use taste descriptors to help intensify their contact with a given coffee, and they give equal importance to the singularity and the universality of the flavors they are assessing. Both cohorts of tasters are concerned with objectivity, but sensory scientists pursue a universal objectivity whereas professional coffee tasters are content with a practical objectivity so long as it successfully leads to discoveries about what tastes the coffee is presenting. In recent years, the idea has grown among purveyors of coffee that scientific tasting can remedy the intrusion of subjectivity into tasting; however, close examination reveals that subjectivity is a required component of an objective understanding of a coffee’s taste. This decisive separation pivots around competing understandings of the resources of taste descriptors in their situated usages.

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