The Price of Words: How Language Makes (and Unmakes) Coffee

Coffee is never just liquid. It is speech. It is adjectives whispered across a cupping table, shouted on a label, murmured in a café menu, or etched into a scoring sheet. Before the coffee reaches our lips, it has already been swallowed by language.

The Spell of Words

This seems harmless — almost inevitable. Of course we describe what we drink. Of course we tell each other what we feel. But here is the unease: in coffee, words are not just ornaments. They are instruments of value. A single syllable can raise a price, or lower it. A metaphor can dignify a farmer, or erase them. A wheel of flavors can orient a generation of tasters, or trap them inside a paradigm.

The coffee itself does not change. But the way we speak it does.

Transparency Is Not Absolute

In the world of tasting, we often hear the word “transparency.” But transparency is not a switch that flicks on or off. It is a spectrum.

• You sip a cup and feel orange blossom. Clear, distinct, confident. The note is transparent to you.

• Another day, you sip and feel flowers. Vague, blurry, a family without a name. This is partial transparency — you see the outline, but not the face.

• Another time, you sip and sense something floral but can’t hold it at all. Or the cup hides itself behind roast, water, your fatigue. Then transparency is gone — the coffee is opaque.

Transparency lives in the encounter between cup and tongue, bean and brain, moment and memory. It is never guaranteed. It fluctuates with the roast, the water, the room, the quality of your sleep, the depth of your training. What is transparent to one taster may be invisible to another.

The industry pretends transparency is fixed — as if there were a final list of notes waiting inside each coffee, waiting to be discovered like stones in a riverbed. But in truth, transparency is a negotiation: a dance between what the cup offers and what the taster can name.

The Triad: Transparency, Complexity, Quality

From transparency, the industry builds a ladder. It is the hidden triad of sensory value:

1. Transparency — Can we name a descriptor?

2. Complexity — Can we name many?

3. Quality — Do those descriptors carry cultural prestige?

This structure feels natural, almost scientific. But it is also fragile, slippery, and deeply political.

Consider four scenarios:

• High transparency, high complexity, high-prestige descriptors

  You taste bergamot, lychee, pineapple, blood orange, hazelnut gianduja. The coffee feels clear, layered, articulate. And the words themselves glow with value in the global market. Price soars.

• High transparency, low complexity, high-prestige descriptors

  You taste lychee, pineapple, blood orange, guava. Exotic fruits, distinct but narrow. No chocolate, no flowers — only a slim range of prestige fruits. The coffee is transparent but not complex. Still valuable, though often praised less than the first.

• Partial transparency, medium complexity, low-prestige descriptors

  You taste “floral,” “stone fruit,” “fermented,” “cocoa powder.” Families without fine edges. The coffee speaks, but with a muffled accent. Price stagnates.

• Low transparency, low complexity, low-prestige descriptors

  You taste cocoa, sweetness, bitterness, a trace of sourness. Words that sound generic, low-status, supermarket. Even if the cup is honest and clean, price sinks.

Notice: the bean has not changed. What shifts is our ability to name — and the cultural library of what counts as prestige. Transparency, complexity, and quality are not absolute properties of coffee. They are properties of language-in-use.

From bag to cup, coffee always passes through language — beans become words, and words become value.

The Cultural Weight of Words

This is where the spell of words becomes obvious. Descriptors are not equal.

• In one place, raw cocoa means depth and authenticity. In another, it signals bitterness and poverty.

• Panela is rich, alive, and familiar to millions at origin. But on export cupping sheets, it is often replaced by “caramel,” because panela “doesn’t sell.”

• Guava may be an everyday fruit at a farm, yet “lychee” becomes exotic luxury in a European catalog.

• Belgian praline sounds refined to some buyers; to a picker it means nothing.

The same cup, re-labeled, carries different price tags. This is not discovery — it is translation as hierarchy.

A descriptor is never neutral. It arrives with cultural baggage, economic associations, class signals. It can lift a coffee into an auction or bury it in commodity bins. It can flatter a roaster’s customers or confuse them into disinterest. It can affirm a farmer’s experience or overwrite it with imported terms.

Language is not just reporting flavor. It is constructing value.

Calibration as Ritual

To make this more “objective,” we created rituals: calibration. Tasters gather, cups take their places, samples face one another, flavor wheels turn, aroma kits unfold — and the ritual begins. We try to agree. We standardize roast degrees, water chemistry, spoon technique. We repeat, adjust, debate.

Calibration helps. It protects us from solipsism (the belief that only one’s own mind is certain to exist). It forces us to check our instincts, compare our memories, discipline our tongues. But calibration is also politics in disguise.

• Who chose the wheel? WCR? SCA? Another lexicon?

• Who leads the session? A Q Instructor? A national champion? A buyer?

• Whose descriptors are accepted as “precise,” and whose are dismissed as “too vague”?

• What roast and water are used, and who benefits from those parameters?

Even the most sincere calibration is not pure objectivity. It is a negotiated performance, shaped by institutions, markets, and preferences. We gather to minimize bias — but the tools we use to minimize it are themselves products of bias.

The Errors We Carry

And then come the errors:

• Anchoring — once someone says “blueberry,” we cannot un-hear it.

• Priming — aroma kits preload our senses; we find what we just rehearsed.

• Status effect — the most senior voice at the table defines “truth.”

• Expectation — a Gesha lot seduces us into finding florals even when they’re faint.

• Groupthink — we agree for harmony, not accuracy.

Add fatigue, roast variation, water instability, environmental distractions. Even our most careful tastings are fragile. Transparency flickers, complexity folds, quality shifts with our moods.

And yet the market treats these words as sacred: ‘This coffee is 93+, with notes of jasmine blossom, white peach, lychee, blood orange, champagne, gianduja, yuzu, wild honey, elderflower, nougat, macadamia.’ No mention of the biases, the calibrations, the conditions. No date of evaluation, no record of who tasted it. Just a litany of words, dressed as fact — and we are left with many questions to ask.

Science and Language

Behind every descriptor there is chemistry: volatile compounds rising from the cup, binding to receptors, firing neurons. Linalool, β-damascenone, 2-furfurylthiol, ethyl butyrate — molecules with shape, weight, and behavior. Their presence can be measured, their thresholds mapped, their interactions traced. This is the objective side of coffee: a catalog of aroma compounds, grounded in physics and chemistry.

But the leap from compound to word is never chemical — it is linguistic. Linalool might be jasmine to one taster, orange blossom to another, perfume to a third. 2-furfurylthiol can smell like roasted coffee itself, or like burnt sugar. β-damascenone may read as dried fruit, baked apple, or even rose, depending on memory. The molecule is real, but the word is chosen.

This is why descriptors are fragile. Chemistry gives us signals; language turns them into stories. To confuse one for the other is to mistake science for speech. Real science admits this divide: it measures molecules, but it does not dictate metaphors.

Learning to navigate that gap is one of the hardest — and most liberating — skills in coffee. It is why we built Compound, a core course of The Better Coffee Curriculum, to help people connect chemical reality with sensory imagination without collapsing one into the other.

In a single hand: beans, labor, and language. Coffee is never just taste — it carries lives, cultures, and value.

An Exercise in Price-MakingTry this:

Describe an expensive coffee in six adjectives. (Go ahead, choose luxurious ones — rose petals, honeydew honey, marigold, ripe pineapple, red wine, Brazil nut, passion fruit, nougat.)

Now describe a cheap coffee in six adjectives. (Stale bread, cardboard, charcoal, instant coffee, wet wood, rubber tire.)

What happened? You created two price ranges with nothing but language. No farm, no process, no roast. Words alone shaped value.

Now imagine a farmer who prepared that lot. Where do your adjectives place her? Does she get paid less — not because of her work, but because her cup doesn’t align with your imagination of prestige?

This is the violence of words.

Between Care and Coercion

But words are not only harmful. They can also help. They can translate a farmer’s world to a buyer’s market. They can guide a barista’s hand to brew a coffee at its best. They can invite a consumer into new experiences.

The question is not whether we should use descriptors. The question is: what job do we make them do?

Do they function as mutual aid — helping people cooperate across the coffee circle? Or do they function as capital violence — raising and lowering value based on cultural privilege?

This is the spell we must break.

What The Standard Reminds Us

The Better Coffee Standard gives us a compass for these questions. Among its values are Dignity Is the First Metric, Sensory Justice, and Knowledge Must Be Shared. These are not abstractions; they are checkpoints. They ask us to examine whether our words raise or lower dignity, whether our vocabularies include or exclude, whether the language we use belongs to everyone or is fenced off by markets. Without this compass, critique risks drifting. With it, we see clearly: descriptors are not just sensory tools, but ethical choices.

The Violence of Vocabulary

Previously we followed descriptors as they shaped transparency, complexity, and quality. We saw how jasmine and Belgian praline travel as prestige, while cocoa and panela sink into ordinariness. Now we must go further — into the politics hidden inside tasting rooms, score sheets, and marketing copy. Words are not just floating labels; they are weapons, masks, bargaining chips, and sometimes — lifelines.

Calibration as Authority

Calibration is supposed to be democracy in action: tasters aligning, negotiating, reaching consensus. In practice, it often resembles a courtroom.

One person leads. Their language becomes the anchor. If they say blackberry, others hesitate to say blueberry. If they say jasmine, others stop at floral. The hierarchy of voice maps onto the hierarchy of value. Experienced cuppers, Q Instructors, national champions, or green buyers become judges. Their certainty creates a gravitational field.

This is not necessarily malicious. It is the logic of authority. We want standards. We want stability. But stability is never neutral. It serves someone. And in coffee, stability often serves the buyer more than the farmer, the roaster more than the picker. Calibration, then, becomes a politics of vocabulary — pretending to be objectivity while channeling power.

The Market’s Favorite Bias

Bias does not only creep in. It is invited.

• Anchoring bias ensures that the first word spoken becomes the baseline.

• Expectation bias ensures that Gesha tastes floral, that Castillo tastes “ordinary.”

• Priming bias ensures that if we sniffed a Scentone vial of “wild cherry,” we will find wild cherry later.

• Groupthink bias ensures we align for harmony rather than accuracy.

The market loves these biases because they create predictable hierarchies. They guarantee that Gesha lots will keep being sold as florals, that auction descriptions will remain saturated with exotic fruits, that “nutty” Brazil will keep its place at the bottom of the price pyramid. Bias keeps the theater running.

Every sip is more than flavor — it carries the words that named it, and the lives that made it possible.

Pointwashing: The Sweet Veneer

This is where pointwashing appears. We dress coffees in adjectives and numbers as if they were facts. A coffee with “92 points, notes of jasmine and bergamot” is not presented as an interpretation — it is presented as a truth. Consumers nod. Roasters print it. Farmers pray the score stays above 87 — or 85, or even just 80.

But every point and every word hides conditions: the roast degree chosen, the water chemistry used, the cupping table hierarchy, the cultural library of the panel. The veneer of objectivity hides the machinery of subjectivity. And this machinery is not innocent: it is tuned to produce predictable winners and losers.

Pointwashing is not just lying about scores. It is telling the truth selectively, hiding the scaffolding, presenting a fragile consensus as natural law.

The Exercise of Deception

Imagine this:

Take the very same coffee. Serve it to one group of tasters under the headline: “Exclusive, award-winning micro-lot, competition-ready.”

Serve it to another group under the headline: “Bulk blend, commodity grade, supermarket special.”

The liquid has not changed. But perception has. One group leans in, searching for elegance. The other shrugs, prepared to taste defects. This is the deception of adjectives and context: they conjure not only flavors, but entire realities.

Sometimes in bad faith — marketing dressed up as luxury. Sometimes in good faith — tasters primed by expectation. Either way, words and frames bend the cup long before it reaches the tongue.

Words as Violence

Here lies the theoretical kernel: language is not a neutral mirror. It is a tool of violence. Not always bloody, not always cruel, but structural — bending reality to fit the market’s logic.

We allow this violence because we mistake it for communication. We think we are sharing experience, but often we are enforcing hierarchy. The farmer learns which words sell. The roaster selects labels that trigger desire. The café prints notes that flatter consumers. The consumer repeats them to friends. The loop completes itself.

In this loop, words stop being mutual aid. They become defenses and weapons. They protect some, exclude others. They move money across the chain not by reflecting taste, but by manipulating how taste is spoken.

A critical theorist would say: we are caught in the fantasy that language reveals essence. In reality, language constructs demand. “Neutral” vocabulary is never neutral — it is always an ideological machine, smoothing over contradictions and disguising the violence beneath.

The Auction Paradox

Consider an auction lot described as champagne, lychee, jasmine, white peach. The price explodes. Now imagine the same lot described as fermented fruit, floral, stone fruit, sweet. The price shrinks. The coffee has not changed. Only the words have.

Here is the paradox: we call the first description “transparent” and the second “vague.” But in truth, both are transparent — they simply use different levels of naming. The first borrows prestige, the second stays grounded. The difference is not clarity, but cultural status.

This is why farmers sometimes feel trapped: to sell, they must adopt descriptors that resonate with distant buyers, even if those words mean nothing in their own communities. They must translate their lived sensory world into a vocabulary designed by markets thousands of kilometers away. And if they don’t, their coffees risk invisibility.

The Silence of the Non-Transparent

And then there are coffees that resist naming. Subtle, folded, shy cups that whisper instead of shout. They may carry profound balance, slow evolution, comfort in repetition. But when a panel cannot name them with prestige, they are dismissed as “lacking character.”

The silence of non-transparency is punished. A farmer whose coffee is subtle may receive less than one whose coffee is loud. Complexity and volume are rewarded; subtlety is forgotten. And yet, in another cultural context, that same subtlety might be prized as elegance.

This is not a defect of the coffee. It is a defect of the descriptor economy.

Even here, with eyes closed, the taster leans on words. Aroma turns into language — and language turns into value.

How Language Cracks Under Pressure

The cracks are already showing. As experimental fermentations multiply, the vocabulary drifts into parody. “Coconut gelato mango mojito.” “Passionfruit cola marshmallow tiramisu.” “Blueberry yogurt bubblegum champagne.” “Red wine pineapple guava chocolate.” “Coca-Cola, Skittles, freeze-dried strawberry chips.” “Haribo gummies, Twix, Dr. Pepper aftertaste.”

This is not description — it is inflation. When every coffee is dressed in candy aisles and cocktail menus, the adjectives stop distinguishing. They collapse under their own excess.

The industry’s reflex is to double down: inventing new rubrics, acronyms, categories. But all of this is just another mask. The real issue remains: descriptors are treated as currency, not as solidarity.

Toward Words That Care

The violence of vocabulary is not destiny. Words can harm, but they can also heal. Descriptors can be deployed as bridges instead of borders.

• A roaster who uses both caramel and panela on a label invites consumers to learn without erasing origin language.

• A cupping leader who accepts “flower” as valid, rather than dismissing it for lack of specificity, allows beginners to participate and farmers to feel recognized.

• A buyer who notes the brewing conditions of their descriptors — “92°C in soft water revealed honeysuckle” — gives context instead of presenting taste as universal truth.

These are small shifts, but they reframe language as mutual aid. They remind us that descriptors are not facts carved into beans, but shared attempts to communicate.

Reclaiming the Vocabulary of Coffee

Words cut, but they also stitch. Vocabulary can wound when it serves price, and it can heal when it serves people. The challenge is to turn descriptors from chains into bridges — to let them connect rather than divide. To speak coffee in a way that honors both the liquid in the cup and the lives behind it.

From Market Speech to Human Speech

Most of our current language is market speech. Its purpose is to increase demand, elevate prestige, justify price. It is competitive, ornamental, theatrical. Its violence lies not only in what it says, but in what it silences: local terms, humble descriptors, cups that resist performance.

Human speech is different. It uses words to cooperate, to educate, to share experience honestly. Human speech admits uncertainty: “flower” instead of “jasmine” if that is all you feel. It respects local vocabulary: “panela” alongside “caramel.” It discloses conditions: “we tasted this at 92°C in soft water.” It does not erase the scaffolding of calibration; it exposes it.

This is the first move toward sensory justice: refusing to let words masquerade as neutral facts, and insisting that they remain accountable to people.

What The Standard Demands

The Better Coffee Standard lays down values that act as guardrails for language. Among them:

• Dignity Is the W Metric — language must never strip dignity from those who produce or serve coffee.

• Sensory Justice — taste belongs to everyone; descriptors cannot be weapons of exclusion.

• Knowledge Must Be Shared — lexicons, wheels, and vocabularies are commons, not proprietary fences.

• Mutual Aid and Shared Resources — words should serve the entire coffee circle, not just marketing departments.

• We Speak the Names of Power — when language reinforces hierarchies, we must name it and refuse it.

Taken together, these values turn descriptors from currencies into commons. They redefine what it means to “speak coffee.”

Practical Ethics of Language

How might this look in practice?

1) Describe Honestly, Not Aspirationally

Say what you actually perceive, not what you think will sell. If you feel “flower,” don’t push to “jasmine” unless you are truly confident. Honesty creates trust; aspiration creates inflation.

2) Disclose Your Conditions

Tell people how you reached your descriptors: the roast degree, the water chemistry, the brew method. Let others know the frame that produced your language.

3) Use Dual Vocabulary

Respect local descriptors. If the farmer says panela, write panela — and add caramel for foreign markets if needed. Don’t erase; translate.

4) Protect the Non-Transparent

Not every great coffee is loud. Build structures that reward subtlety, balance, and cups that resist fireworks. Don’t punish a farmer because their coffee whispers instead of screams.

5) Invite Beginners and Outsiders

Accept “fruit” and “sweet” as valid. Don’t shame vague descriptors. They are entry points, not failures. Language should invite people into coffee, not push them out.

6) Speak as Mutual Aid

Ask yourself: does this descriptor help someone else? A roaster? A brewer? A farmer? If it doesn’t, it may be ornamental violence.

Coffee is not only brewed in cups but also in dialogue — every exchange shapes how language, value, and dignity circulate.

Two Futures of a Cup

Imagine the same coffee, spoken in two different languages:

Market Speech:“Rose petals, lychee, almond nougat, champagne acidity. Clean and smooth body. 91 points.”(The cup is elevated. The farmer may benefit briefly, but the system of prestige descriptors is reinforced. Subtle coffees are punished. Local words are erased.)

Human Speech:“White flowers (orange blossom for some), tropical fruits (perhaps lychee or guava depending on memory), cocoa sweetness (panela at origin). Clear and articulate at 92°C in soft water; harsher in harder water. A gentle roast keeps the florals alive.”(The cup is contextualized. Local vocabulary is preserved. The buyer knows how to brew. The farmer sees their world respected. The coffee is priced with dignity, not with adjectives.)

The liquid is identical. The futures diverge.

Why Neutrality Is Violence

Here is the philosophical turn. We often defend our language by saying: “We’re neutral. We just describe what’s there.” But neutrality is the greatest violence of all. Because what pretends to be neutral is always aligned with existing power.

When we say “bergamot” is neutral or objective, we erase the colonial histories that made bergamot a prestige word. When we say “chocolate” is neutral, we erase the farmers who actually live with cacao as daily food, not as luxury. When we say “quality is universal,” we disguise the fact that “quality” is defined by markets, not by humanity.

Neutrality is never neutral. It is a mask for domination.

An Exercise in Re-Speaking Coffee

Exercise 1: Rewrite a Label

Take a label that says “jasmine, lychee, praline.” Rewrite it using only words from the farmer’s culture. What changes? How does price shift in your imagination?

Exercise 2: Transparent vs. Opaque

Taste a coffee and write down only what you are 100% sure of. Then write what you feel vaguely. Notice the gradient of transparency. How much of “quality” comes from your confidence, not the cup itself?

Exercise 3: Cheap vs. Expensive

Without listing farms, processes, or roasts, describe one coffee as “cheap” and another as “expensive.” Don’t overthink — just let the words flow.

Now step back. Notice how quickly your language created a hierarchy. No liquid was tasted, no beans were handled, yet value appeared out of thin air.

This is the hidden labor of words: they don’t just describe coffee, they arrange it into classes. And once arranged, it becomes all too easy for those classes to deceive.

Beyond Descriptors

Some will ask: should we abandon descriptors altogether? 

No. 

That would be absurd. Words are our only tools for sharing sensory life. Without them, coffee becomes mute, trapped in private experience.

The task is not to abandon, but to reframe. To accept descriptors as fallible, cultural, partial — and still useful. To wield them as tools of communication, not weapons of price. To honor their fragility instead of pretending to their neutrality.

A Quiet Note on TRM

In our work, we use The Ranking Method to disconnect descriptors from price. We still describe coffees, but price is anchored in dignity, not adjectives. Descriptors remain as communication, not as currency. This is not the center of today’s essay — it is simply one example of how we can step out of the descriptor economy without losing the joy of words.

Closing: Speak So People Can Live

Coffee has always been more than flavor. It is labor, ecology, debt, survival. But we have allowed adjectives to masquerade as arbiters of value. We have allowed calibration to pretend to be objectivity. We have allowed neutrality to hide violence.

It is time to break the spell.

Let words be words: fragile, cultural, biased, beautiful. Let them invite, not exclude. Let them honor farmers’ vocabularies, not erase them. Let them support baristas, not burden them. Let them guide roasters, not seduce them into lies.

Above all, let words never again decide whether someone lives with dignity. Elderflowers, honey, cocoa, nougat — these are flavors, not wages.

We speak coffee not to inflate scores, but to protect lives. Speak accordingly.