What Niche Magazines Can Teach Us About Taste

Rostro is a coffee shop near Yoyogi park. Sit down at a bar, and you are faced with an option of different flavors (sweet, nutty, fruity, tart) and different strengths, depending on the grounds-to-water ratio. Make your selection, and you are in for a carefully choreographed ritual. It starts with hand-grinding the coffee beans with a device seemingly dating from the turn of the last century that I last saw in my grandmother’s house, followed by a lab-like system of syphon tubes. Each step is done with a lot of care, skill, and technique. The coffee, once it arrived, was great, as was the members-only feel surrounding it, but the nuances of its flavor and texture were lost on me. I am not a coffee connoisseur.

There are a lot of those who are. There are also foodies, audiophiles, vinyl lovers, fitness junkies, sneakerheads, fashionistas, soccer fans, global nomads, wellness aficionados. In each of these self-identifies taste groups, taste is an activity that engages them on more than a casual level. Coffee, food, travel, or exercise are not passive leisure activities. Instead, they require investment of consumers’ attention, time, and money. The more time, attention, money, and skill consumers spend on them, coffee making, cooking, traveling, become more enjoyable. Specific techniques and rituals emerge. Community is formed. A vocabulary emerges (“beaters,”…