On coffee's McCarthy era part 2

Regarding the SCA and CQI deal, more of the industry's avoidance, and how to push back on this despairing moment

When Lolita was finished, Vladimir Nabokov couldn’t find a publisher for a long time. It took years for anyone to touch the book, so repulsive was the subject matter. He was compelled, though: A critical eye toward the book lays bare a heavy rebuke of criminality and abuse. Nabokov made few demands, thankful to have a publisher for his allegorical warning. He remained firm on a cover that wouldn’t sexualize the young Dolores Hayes like his villainous Humbert Humbert. Instead, he wanted images of eternal youth, lace and clouds. If not that, he wanted a white cover with black lettering.

It didn’t matter. Captured in Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design, most presses knew the supposed scintillating tale of taboo love would sell better with a heaping hand of sex. Outside of a few early runs, almost all the books looked diametric to the creator’s intention. Nabokov even had to smack his son for judging a Lolita look-alike contest decades later, such has been the multigenerational misunderstandings of the book’s core tenants.

The wrong take away of the book cemented in the public mind. Rather than its intent — a full-throated condemnation — the almost entirely male publishers, directors, producers, and critics said it was a love story. Avoiding the truth of the matter wasn’t just a misreading of the text. It was an intentional choice to make money and to consolidate power. In this case, to bottle the swarming popularity of a book dealing with woeful, dark themes.

In the case of coffee, avoiding the truth of the matter is also no mere misreading of what is going on within the industry. Like in Nabokov’s heyday, it’s punishable to speak out regarding the real problems in coffee, and further afield. One Bluesky user commented on part one of this essay saying it’s a mistake to assume people in coffee aren't contributing to causes they care about or donating to political operations. Of course, that is not the point of this essay. The point is the general behavior and climate of the coffee industry, the dominant narrative, that coffee professionals and fandoms exist within. To the user and reader’s argument, that a hypothetical (or real) coffee person maintains strong values and ethics without *anyone’s knowledge* is in fact the issue.

(Paolo Bicchieri)

Not only is the McCarthy era quashing these critical conversations. There are real harms when industries and those workers composing them lose their back bones; Think of the DEI rollbacks swamping major companies since January 2025. In April, Starbucks, where DEI clings on for now, disallowed workers of pins and personalization. The quiet part out loud: No more union or political signage on those green aprons. This era flattens a smooth brain highway into stupid new territory.

Enter the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA)’s acquisition of the Q Grading Program.

Without any fore knowledge to coffee graders around the world, the SCA took over the flagship evaluating program of the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI). At the end of April, the two announced their “historic partnership” while many impacted the decision arrived in Houston for major coffee conference the Specialty Coffee Expo. Effectively, this means the shared grading language for coffee — which had real problems — will be dead and gone on October 1, 2025. The SCA’s Coffee Value Assessment, which was already a Thing that few learned, will be the new textbook. The organization says Q Graders can become “evolved Q graders” by taking a two day class by September 30. If not, everyone and anyone will be required to take a six day class organized entirely by the SCA. CQI will not teach any quality evaluation courses, only post-harvest classes.

In advance of the expo, the Specialty Coffee Association board was reportedly instructed to not comment on major issues facing the industry. Top of mind for many, politically motivated or otherwise, are coffee prices. Instead, the message to stand on was this exciting new partnership. Sandra Lee, a Q instructor (and my personal instructor) put it well on social media. “The SCA & CQI making a backdoor deal that invalidates 10,000 active Q Licenses on September 30,” her post reads while she looks, fatigued, at the camera.

This move is a prime example of cleaving to the wrong message in turbulent times. The fourth wave coffee movement for many has been to take further the tools of grading and indigenize them at origin; Seniman Coffee in Indonesia’s flavor wheel in Bahasa, for instance. Now, instead of dealing with the real issues facing the industry, two of the most important nongovernmental organizations in coffee have, somehow, made everyone work harder for no reason. If nothing else, this has been activating for many in coffee.

Nick Brown, the editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine, told the Map it Forward podcast the conversations that need to happen in coffee shifted since the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that point, he says workers’s livelihoods, the unsustainable nature of sourcing, and how to support the most marginalized in coffee were key topics for even the top dogs at SCA. Now, that’s all a bit too risky; in early May, the SCA’s chief research officer shared a Starbucks job to his LinkedIn hive before at least acknowledging “lots of discussion about the SCA's Coffee Value Assessment lately.”

This partnership is a pig-headed move so unfounded it flys in the face of not just political conversations, but actual progress. Mokhtar Alkhanshali of Port of Mokha wrote in his summarizing essay “The Q(ueen) is Dead” that this decision is a desperate attempt to regain control after the SCA’s CVA program was rejected for more than a year. “We’re already dealing with crisis-level issues: climate change, volatile markets, speculative pricing, collapsing yields, supply chain shocks, tariffs,” Alkhanshali wrote. “The idea of building a new global certifying body from scratch, in the middle of all this, feels overwhelming.”

He advocates for a coffee tasting guild, of sorts, like the Roasters Guild to step up. This is a pro-worker, community-led initiative. I admit Alkhanshali is a friend, so I’m biased, but this is a concrete example of pushing back on this McCarthy era. Don’t let all the talking and writing glaze your eyes: These are ideas as paramount to the present and future of coffee as those legendary quibbles in the British coffee houses in the mid-1700s. These dialogues are what stimulate democratic action.

I understand the risks involved. A loss of sales, a loss of community. With margins so thin, the grading system of the industry withering, one more hardship feels impossible.

(Paolo Bicchieri)

It’s not just coffee wrestling with this morality: during the first week of May 2025, National Endowment for the Arts grants have been stripped from awardees whose projects do not “align with the President’s agenda,” per an email from the federal government. Should Mosab Abu Toha, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in the same week, not write about the destruction of his homeland? To make sure he would be eligible for a new and improved NEA? Should coffee, lodged for better and for worse as the platonic third space for millennial and Gen Z minds, exist as an apolitical landscape? To make sure extra cafe au laits can be bought and sold?

Do not be like my detractor suggests, subverting in the dark alone. Do not be ashamed of your convictions. Do not put the wrong cover on this book to grease the wheel for better coin.

Spro’s Rick Lee and I discussed the first part of this essay in its comment section, and he made an important point: These issues will come home to your roaster, your suppliers, your cafe. Perhaps you have a transgender or non-binary staff member or colleague on bar. Perhaps the tariffs have crunched your numbers even harder. More so, the genesis issue for so many, farmer livelihoods and making excellent coffee, necessarily requires a functioning global and national order. If you can’t be honest about even that part of the value chain, then wrapping your head around coffee’s McCarthy era may be too far down the road.

Start with Coffeeland. Maybe Coffee Milk Blood. Or with the work of Bart Jones and his Cxffeeblack. These could be entryways to better dissect these issues. But rest assured, not engaging — “I’m not a political person” — is not an option. It isn’t in the cushiest of white collar jobs, in my reading of the world. In a profession like coffee, transforming a commodity grown in a different country into an ever-more expensive beverage, it is worse than stupidity to sit back. It’s moral cowardice.