The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States

This article examines the rise of specialty coffee as a marker of taste, class and cosmopolitanism in the United States. Roseberry focuses on the "shaping of taste", the rise of specialty coffee as a response to mass-marketing and standardization of an earlier time, and the (re)organization of markets and corporations in the coffee industry in particular and commodities in general. Using trade journals and a historical, sociological, and anthropological approach, Roseberry asks whether "the study of changing marketing and consumption patterns of a single commodity at a particular moment...[can] shed some light on a wider range of social and cultural shifts."