Who Started Specialty Coffee? (Solved & Explained!)

Specialty coffee was first used as a term in an issue of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal by Erna Knutsen in 1974, a few years after the first Starbucks had opened. It was used to describe beans with the best flavor that are produced in specific micro-climates. These beans are planted, grown, and picked in just the right time frames for the best flavor.

The rest of this article is going to dive into the history of specialty coffee and what makes it how we know it today.

What Is Specialty Coffee?

Specialty coffee refers to coffee that is grown at high altitudes, the right time of year, in the best quality soil, and picked at just the right time, with great care given by the farmers. It is then shipped off to be sold directly to the roasters or at a premium to coffee traders.

Specialty coffee is a coffee that scores anywhere above 80 points on a scale of 100 points on a coffee grading scale. Anything lower cannot be considered a specialty coffee.

When Did Specialty Coffee Start?

Specialty coffee as a way of having good quality beans has been around since as far back as the 1900s when the Hotel du Crillon in Paris had had a standard that their coffee was to be bought from specific micro-lots in certain parts of Guatemala. In 1974 Erna Knutsen coined the term and gave a name to a movement of coffee that was starting to take its stride.

Roasters like Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee helped bring about a coffee revolution that brought commercial coffee from simply a convenient way to get a good morning coffee to an experience of drinking the best tasting coffee. This also followed with improving agricultural practices as well as brewing and roasting technologies to make specialty coffee available for anyone around the world.

It is not gourmet or premium coffee and should not be confused as such. It is not mass-produced and only accounts for only 5% of the total amount of coffee production in the world. It is usually produced in limited quantities since the beans are typically grown in small batches.

 What is the Third Wave Of Coffee?

The Third Wave of coffee is a movement of coffee production and marketing that emphasizes high quality. It was first used as a term by Timothy Castle in 1999 where he was referring to the stages of coffee in the U.S.

Castle states that in the beginning, the first wave was where coffee was packaged and was sent across the United States as it grew as a country where the coffee was roasted at home. Then around the late 1800s to 1960s where it morphed into a product that was roasted locally, often in grocery stores, and then pre-roasted, sold in stores prepackaged, and then later pre-ground.

The second wave, he says, was a movement to recreate the freshness of what coffee was like in the beginning of the first wave before all the commercialization. It was invoked by existing companies that revamped themselves as well as entrepreneurs of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They promoted the brewing of coffee in-house and the selling of bulk one-pound bags to repeat customers for retail use.

The third wave of coffee was when the second wave companies began acquiring other companies and the market for specialty coffee continued to grow. This gave the third-wave roasters an opportunity to grow as well. This wave focused even more on the quality of the coffee while taking into account the failures of the second wave and avoiding them.

They took part in the by then fully realized trend of purchasing micro-lots of single-estate coffee producers that ship to a single customer. The roaster of the third wave also focused a lot on quality control of every level of the roasting process and preparing beverages.

What Is The Difference Between Specialty Coffee And Commercial Coffee?

The difference between specialty coffee and commercial coffee is that specialty coffee comes as the whole beans in bags that need to be ground before brewing, and commercial coffee is normally instant or pre-ground and packaged in containers or vacuum-sealed plastic packaging.

Specialty coffee is roasted in small factories or stores with more traditional methods and sold where it is roasted while Commercial coffee is usually made by nationally recognized and advertised brands that are mass-produced and roasted in bigger factories. Commercial coffee is also shipped to grocery stores.

Commercial coffee has a very limited selection of roasts usually just dark, medium, and light with no single origins. Specialty coffee has a wider selection and can be bought based on the location of origin, by roast, and in creative blends that generally depend on the shop and are sometimes exclusive.

Is Starbucks A Specialty Coffee?

Starbuck is the reason that we have specialty coffee as it is today but in essence, the answer is no. Starbucks introduced specialty coffee beverages to the coffee scene such as lattes and espresso. They are the reason that specialty coffee exists how we know it today, especially with their popularizing of espresso drinks in general.

The reason why Starbucks wouldn’t be considered a specialty coffee is due to the quality of their beans.

They do in fact have a lot of single-origin coffees, but over time they ended up putting consistency as a priority instead of quality due to the sudden high demand once they became popular and spread across the country. Nowadays they source from many farms and tend to over-roast their beans which ends up sacrificing the quality.

It’s for this reason that Starbucks coffee doesn’t pass many of the quality tests required for specialty coffee to be considered as such. Their beans aren’t as fresh often with no date on the bags of when it was made, and they don’t disclose specific information on the origins of their coffee, though they do claim its origins to common specialty coffee origins.

That being said, Starbucks is still a somewhat cheaper way of getting specialty coffee without a steep price and without the quality of real single-origin coffee roasters.