Against Interpretation (In Coffee)
How Susan Sontag's seminal essay speaks to the constraints we place on coffee—and what breaking free could look like.
First, a note: We’re continuing to experience sweeping threats to our civil liberties and rights. Everyone in the United States is owed due process—not just citizens. Our government continues to violate the Constitution by denying due process to the people it’s detained/kidnapped over the last few weeks. Stay vigilant.
Recently, I interviewed Kay Cheon—the newly awarded 2025 United States Barista Champion—for Fresh Cup (that piece will be out tomorrow, April 4). One of the ideas we discussed, but which I left on the cutting-room floor, was the role of themes in coffee competitions.
Barista competitions are tight, 15-minute presentations during which a competitor has to serve four espressos, four milk-based drinks, and four signature drinks. Those drinks are primarily built on stage, all while the contestant presents to a panel of four judges. Usually, competitors find it’s easier to structure their routines around a specific theme, making the sensory experiences they deliver to the judges more coherent.
But during our conversation, Kay and I both agreed that the industry now feels “post-theme.” Because information about coffee is much more available and accessible than it used to be, baristas don’t need to worry as much about making the content of their presentations comprehensible. Instead, they can focus on creating authentic experiences that aren’t so hemmed in by theme.
This idea of themes—of operating within clearly defined, narrow parameters—made me think about how we interpret the world around us more generally, and specifically how we interpret our experiences of coffee.
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve pretended to identify the tasting notes written on a bag of beans, for instance, or completely changed my thoughts about a cup of coffee after being given more information about it—like when a roaster friend commented that a coffee I had been enjoying actually tasted stale. In both instances, I trusted the context given to me by others more than the sensory experience I was having myself.
These experiences brought to mind Susan Sontag’s essential essay, “Against Interpretation.” In the short piece, she argues that trying to figure out the “meaning” behind any given piece of art removes sensory pleasure—that “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’”
Instead of liking or experiencing something for the sake of experience, Sontag writes, we are compelled to figure out a “why,” and attempt to ascribe meaning. “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art,” she writes. “It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”
There are certain parallels here with coffee. Lately, I’ve been wondering if trying to quantify the experience of sipping a freshly brewed cup of coffee robs us of that sensory joy. The idea has been percolating in my mind ever since James Hoffmann made a video using multi-sensory experiences to explain how a great cup of coffee makes him feel. At no point did he reference anything about how the coffee was processed, or which varietal he was drinking.
“Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there,” Sontag writes. In other words, we feel unable to simply revel in something beautiful: Instead, we seek to understand why it’s beautiful, and in attempting to pin it down, risk making it lifeless.
(Not) From Seed to Cup
Of course, Sontag’s argument can’t be neatly mapped onto the whole of coffee: There are aspects of coffee’s cultivation and production that should rightly be treated as a science, and data collection, investment in experimentation, and the application of best growing practices, for example, are all areas where we should seek clarity and definitive answers.
Instead, her argument best applies to the experience of coffee as a beverage, and how we find joy in coffee spaces. What do we give up when we try to intellectualize the cup of coffee in front of us? Quite a lot, as Sontag would argue: “In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art,” she says. Interpretation requires us to put a frame around why we like what we like, and to therefore justify it; it narrows the possible scope of our experience.
If the dilution of sensory pleasure is one result of this approach, then another is a stultifying sameness. I’ve written before about “coffee’s age of average,” and anyone who spends time in specialty coffee shops today can clearly see how much the industry defaults to replication. Coffee businesses expand voraciously but without vision, using a singular template of success without really understanding the magic formula that made it work in the first place.
Sontag sees this pattern, too: “Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have,” she writes.
According to Sontag, the solution to these problems isn’t in totally breaking form—reflexively doing so for the sake of subverting interpretation instead signals an industry or movement in crisis. “But programmatic avant-gardism—which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content—is not the only defense against the infestation of art by interpretations. At least, I hope not. For this would be to commit art to being perpetually on the run,” she writes.
So, what can we do instead? If working against interpretation is the goal, I think coffee can learn from the natural wine world, and the way that it embraces a wide range of flavors and production methods while operating outside of traditional varietal constraints.
For coffee shops, this might look like business owners spending more time developing a personal mission and vision, and not simply opening a store to make money or because it looks cool. Expansion for the sake of expansion only results in excess, which makes it harder for us to access and experience real sensory enjoyment.
“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience,” Sontag notes. “All the conditions of modern life —its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”
Looking Inward
I know that I’m stretching Sontag’s argument in a direction she wouldn’t have envisioned, but I like seeing what shakes loose in the process. Her warnings about using interpretation as a placeholder for understanding, and creating things that don’t serve people, feel very relevant for the coffee industry. Her arguments also resonate within my own life, and in the work that I do.
I recently told a friend that I’m the opposite of mysterious: I wear all my emotions on my sleeve. As a writer, I always strive for clarity, and I feel preoccupied with how people will read my words. My editor, reading this now, knows how often I attempt to justify my ideas in anticipation of being interpreted incorrectly. Luckily for me, she edits out most of that circular justification work.
It makes me wonder: What would I create if I weren’t so afraid of being misinterpreted? How might I transcend that striving to be clearly understood, which means only working within the confines of scrutability? In my journalistic work, of course, clear communication is important—but I’m interested in how I can also produce work that defies some of these boundaries.
Sontag reminds us that it’s enough to experience pleasure without context. We don’t always need to find some theme or through line to make our ideas legible. We don’t need to understand what makes a certain coffee shop feel magical. We can simply enjoy a cup of coffee without asking why.