The Third Wave of Coffee Explained (part 2)

To recap, the first wave (Folger’s, Arbuckles, etc., coffee in a can) was all about bringing coffee into the home and creating the possibility for national distribution. The second wave brought people out of the home and into the third space. The Third Wave was not about people at all. It was about coffee. The Third Wave focused entirely on the product at every step, from cultivation, trade, roasting, and brewing.

The Second Wave had first pulled back the veil on the fact that there were individual and unique origins of coffee; however, the coffee produced was still inconsistent and often of low quality. The Third Wave aimed to rectify the quality issue and bring attention to the origin in a way that had never been done before. It started with visiting coffee farms and processing stations and discovering ways to improve practices. This undertaking was the easy part; even the producers knew there were ways to improve. However, they simply had no incentive to do so.

Coffee is traded as a Commodity on the C-market, which means its value is assigned to it by the stock exchange using a variety of factors that do not include the farmer or quality. The factors determining price were not in the farmers’ control, so they had no incentive to change or improve anything. Why would someone work harder at more expense, to get paid the same for doing less?

Direct Trade was a concept that began in the early 1990s as a way to incentivize better-quality coffee. This system’s original idea was to pay premiums outside the C-market based on quality. This was a new concept; word spread from farm to farm and country to country. More roasters adopted this practice, and the amount of quality-incentivized coffee grew over the years. This idea alone made the most significant contribution to the Third Wave as it elevated the quality of coffee to a level that people did not previously realize was possible.

Other tenants of the Third Wave include a revision on the preparation of coffee. This included both roasting and brewing. For the last century, coffee had been roasted dark, either due to a lack of control of the process or simply because the quality was not good enough to enjoy light roasts. During this period, coffee was measured in scoops when brewing. All espresso was made according to the traditional Italian recipe of 14 grams of ground espresso to produce a 35ml liquid yield within a 15-24 second brewing time.

With the new quality incentives at origin paying dividends in the cafe, we had access to new inherent flavors previously undiscovered. Fruit-forward flavors of complex acidity and sweetness were bursting in each cup. These flavors allowed the roast to grow lighter to express these attributes rather than masking defects under the cloak of smoke and ash. New flavor also caused a change in brewing which would flip the old recipe on its head. Instead of a 1:6 ratio using 14 grams of coffee for an espresso, a 1:2 ratio using 18-22 grams of coffee for a triple ristretto would be introduced to highlight brightness and body and reduce bitterness.

This explanation is an oversimplified and condensed summary of a movement that started in the 1990s on the west coast and rippled across the country to New York in 2008. The wave did not thoroughly saturate the US until around 2016, and we continue to feel its effects and benefits today. Coffee today is the greatest it has ever been in the history of the world, and we get to enjoy it every day.
Now, climate change and socioeconomic issues threaten the survival of coffee plants and production around the world. We finally arrived at a place where we have access to the best coffee ever, and we are already threatened to lose it. Let’s hope the Fourth Wave is the preservation of coffee lands and equity of the value chain.