Third Wave Coffee: History, People, and the Movement That Changed How We Drink

Where the name third wave coffee came from, what the first and second waves were, who the movement's roasters were, and the words it left on coffee bags, dated from the sources.

By Jay Arr Updated

The waves are a story the coffee trade tells about itself, and like most such stories they are tidier than the history. This page dates each step from the sources: Mark Pendergrast’s history of coffee, Uncommon Grounds; Rothgeb’s own essay; James Hoffmann’s The World Atlas of Coffee; and the companies’ own records. For how the scoring system grew up alongside the movement, see how coffee scores work.

What “third wave” means

Rothgeb didn’t present the waves as a rule. “First Wave, Second Wave, Third Wave: this is how I think of contemporary coffee,” she wrote, describing three movements within what Erna Knutsen had named specialty coffee, each with its own priorities. “Occasionally, the waves overlap; and one inevitably spills over to influence the next.”

Other writers draw the lines differently, which comes up again below. What they share is a sequence: coffee made cheap and everywhere, then coffee made special, then coffee made by people who wanted to know everything about it.

The first wave: coffee in every kitchen

The first wave built the mass market. Hoffmann dates one of its key moves to 1900, when Hills Bros. began packing coffee in vacuum-sealed cans; longer shelf life meant fewer households roasted their own. Rothgeb lists what specialty people like to blame on the first wave (bad coffee made commonplace, nuance blended away, prices forced down) and what it gave them: air-tight cans, pre-ground portion packs and Juan Valdez. “We borrow a lot from the First Wave, even if we don’t like to acknowledge it,” she added.

By Pendergrast’s figures, US coffee use peaked in 1946, when the average American used 19.8 pounds of coffee a year. An earlier version of this page put the peak at “46 gallons”; Pendergrast’s figure is in pounds of coffee, not gallons of drink. After that, he writes, the industry’s own promotion bureau switched to counting cups a day, which hid how weak those cups were, stretched to sixty-four cups per pound. Even by that measure consumption fell, from 3.1 cups a day in 1962 to 2.2 in 1974.

Specialty coffee gets its name

The phrase “specialty coffee” belongs to Erna Knutsen, who worked at the San Francisco importer B. C. Ireland. In the early 1970s she built a niche selling small lots of better arabica to the tiny roasters appearing along the California coast. In 1974, Pendergrast writes, an interview in the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal had her using “specialty coffees” for the Celebes Kalossi, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe and Yemen Mocha she sold. An earlier version of this page placed the coinage at a 1978 conference in France; Pendergrast dates it to that 1974 interview.

In October 1982, specialty roasters from both coasts met in San Francisco and founded the Specialty Coffee Association of America, with 42 members, according to Pendergrast. Knutsen died on June 16, 2018, just short of 97, the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal reported.

The second wave: Peet’s, Starbucks and espresso

Alfred Peet, a Dutch coffee man who had settled in San Francisco, opened Peet’s Coffee & Tea on April 1, 1966, at Vine and Walnut streets in Berkeley, selling whole beans roasted darker than Americans were used to. Pendergrast adds a caution about calling him the first: in San Francisco, Graffeo, Freed, Teller & Freed and Hardcastle’s, founded in 1963, all came before him.

In 1971 three young entrepreneurs came to Peet to learn the trade. Peet’s says he trained them for two years and supplied roasted beans to their company, Starbucks, until 1973. Starbucks opened in Seattle on March 30, 1971, selling mainly whole beans. Our Peet’s vs Starbucks comparison follows the two companies through Starbucks’ purchase of Peet’s in 1984 and the split of 1987.

The espresso bar came later. Starbucks hired Howard Schultz as head of marketing in 1982, and a trip to a housewares show in Milan in spring 1983 convinced him to serve espresso drinks. When Jerry Baldwin, one of the founders, didn’t want to dilute Starbucks’ whole-bean business, Schultz opened his own coffeehouse, Il Giornale, in April 1986, then bought Starbucks with his investors in 1987, Pendergrast writes. Schultz later adopted the sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s phrase “third place” for Starbucks: somewhere between home and work.

Rothgeb called Starbucks a “hyper-Second Wave company” that brought “latte”, “French Roast” and “cappuccino” into everyday vocabulary. Hoffmann gives it similar credit: Starbucks and businesses like it “undoubtedly paved the way” for today’s specialty coffee, and raised expectations of what a cup of coffee could cost.

Rothgeb names the third wave

Rothgeb’s essay, “Norway and Coffee,” is about Oslo’s baristas, not American roasters. It opens at the November 2002 preliminary rounds of the Norwegian Barista Championships and features two baristas there: Robert Thoresen, whom she describes as the winner of the first World Barista Championship in 2000, and Tim Wendelboe, Norway’s reigning champion. The Roasters Guild’s archived copy prints it in the spring 2003 issue of its newsletter, The Flamekeeper; the reading list on her company’s website dates it November 2002.

Her third wave is defined against automation. “The Third Wave is a reaction to those who want to automate and homogenize Specialty Coffee,” she wrote. She describes a barista-driven movement, wary of inherited rules about crema or extraction time, and given to “avoiding absolutes”. She was unsure it would last: “Maybe this Third Wave is not a wave at all.” What she expected of its baristas is familiar now: they would be able to tell you when their coffee was roasted, how the beans were processed and the idea behind the blend, and offer cupping notes.

An earlier version of this page said two things about the essay that it doesn’t bear out. It said Rothgeb defined the third wave by single origins, lighter roasts, direct relationships with farmers and transparent prices; the essay mentions a featured single origin and knowing how beans were processed, but it doesn’t tie the third wave to lighter roasts and says nothing about direct trade or prices. And it called her a Bay Area roaster at the time; the essay reports from Norway. Rothgeb went on to found Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2011, and its website credits her with coining the term.

Who the third wave was

In the US, the label stuck to a particular group of roasters. Pendergrast writes that Michaele Weissman, in her 2008 book God in a Cup, called them “third wave” coffee people, and featured three buyers: Geoff Watts of Intelligentsia in Chicago, Duane Sorenson of Stumptown in Portland, Oregon, and Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture in Durham, North Carolina. All three were members of the Roasters Guild, which grew out of a 1995 gathering at the SCAA conference and was incorporated in 2000, he adds. Pendergrast ties the name of its newsletter, The Flamekeeper, to the small independent roasters who “kept the flame alive”.

The companies’ own records date them:

Pendergrast’s own shorthand for the three waves fits this group: “the first wave made bad coffee, the second wave pioneered specialty coffee, and the third wave are younger specialty obsessives.” By his account, these roasters built direct relationships with growers and paid well for their beans, though they usually still bought through specialist importers.

The auction that set a new price

Prices at the top end changed in 2004. Hacienda La Esmeralda in Panama entered a lot of Geisha in the Best of Panama, the competition and online auction run by the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama. Hoffmann writes that the coffee was so unusual and distinct that it drew a bid of 21 US dollars a pound, and that the record was beaten in 2006 and 2007, reaching 130 dollars a pound, nearly a hundred times the price of commodity-grade coffee. Our Panama guide has the farm’s history and the recent auction records, and our Gesha guide asks whether it’s worth the price.

Other ways to tell it

The three waves are a trade story, and not everyone tells it the same way.

So “fourth wave” has no agreed meaning. Treat any date for it, including the one in an earlier version of this page, as a writer’s opinion.

Consolidation

Pendergrast saw it coming. Writing in 2010, he named Intelligentsia, Stumptown and Counter Culture as small roasters with glowing reputations, and predicted that “their success will likely lead inexorably to expansion and another round of consolidations.”

By Peet’s own account, it added Stumptown and Intelligentsia in 2015. By late 2018, Pendergrast wrote, the German holding company JAB owned a majority of Peet’s along with Keurig Green Mountain, Caribou and Jacobs Douwe Egberts, while Nestlé had become equally large; he worried that companies of that size could push down the prices paid to growers. Nestlé announced on September 14, 2017, that it had bought a majority stake in Blue Bottle Coffee, the Oakland-based roaster founded by James Freeman. Our Stumptown vs Blue Bottle comparison looks at two of these roasters today.

The movement had its doubts from the start. In Rothgeb’s essay, Thoresen worried about seeming arrogant: “Our opinion is not the standard, and there is no standard.” And the movement’s best-known buying term, Direct Trade, has no shared definition or audit; our guide to coffee certifications covers what each seal and claim does guarantee.

What it means on a bag today

The third wave’s lasting change is information. Hoffmann’s advice to buyers is to “buy as traceable a coffee as possible.” He adds that a coffee kept traceable, with the producer’s, farm’s or cooperative’s name on it, has probably earned a better price, and that a good roaster should be glad to tell you how it buys. His first rule for fresh coffee is a clear roast date on the bag. Those are the same things Rothgeb expected her baristas to know.

On a specialty bag, that usually means:

Our guide to reading a coffee bag label goes line by line.

Brewing is the other half. Weighing coffee and water, rather than scooping, is where our V60 guide starts. Roast is a matter of taste: for espresso, Hoffmann says he prefers lighter roasts because they let the raw coffee’s own character come through, but adds that what he prefers matters only to him.

Sources

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