Sick Waves, Bruh: The Four Waves of Coffee Roasting

Coffee roasting is a mad, mad world of hard and inflexible opinions and not a little snobbery.

Of course, we aren’t immune. We have some hard opinions too and we are cool with the idea of being coffee nerds — though we leave the “coffee snob” label for others. Our opinions about coffee and coffee roasting have a lot to do with learning about the recent history of this heavenly elixir. Today, let’s take a few minutes to discuss one of the most important lessons we are learning:

It’s all about the farmer, the earth and the bean … finally.

The coffee industry is very old - like a thousand years old. But, the past couple centuries of coffee history is often broken up into 3 or 4 “waves”. The “First Wave” is basically coffee before Starbucks, and is marked by coffee as a commodity. Think coffee in a can (or brick) and the “best part of waking up” - Folgers and Sanka and their ilk.

Somewhere around the 1970s companies like Starbucks and Peets and countless specialty coffee shops began to appear. This was the birth of “Second Wave Coffee”. It was really all about the coffee drinker and their myriad ways of bedazzling their espressos - think Niles Crane ordering coffee at Cafe Nervosa. Here you find the birth of hard opinions about dark roasts and city roasts, half-caf cappuccinos, endless coffee sizes, and whispers of cinnamon.

The “Third Wave” is said to have been born out of the work of Intelligentsia, Stumptown, and Counter Culture beginning in the late 1990s. These companies put the bean up front and insisted that roasting coffee to pre-established colors and temperatures (e.g. light, medium, dark) was not the correct way to celebrate the nuances of each coffee origin. The Third Wave begins with the idea that every distinct lot of coffee needs to be understood and treated uniquely by the coffee roaster in order to bring out the very best flavors each coffee has to offer.

Nowadays some in the industry say we are moving into a “Fourth Wave”. The emphasis here is on ethics and justice in coffee. Buzzwords like “traceability”, “direct trade”, and more are thrown around too often without any real accountability. However, the trend towards ensuring farmers are well paid and that the environment is not being exploited is very good and there are more and more coffee professionals that are brewing all the good they can.

Of course each wave continues to this day. You can still get cans of coffee in the grocery store (and coffee pods are just the new coffee can). Starbucks, Peets, Costa and other huge companies are still riding that Second Wave and even starting to acquire the most successful Third Wavers.

Endiro Coffee was really born out of the Third Wave and we see ourselves as an important influencer in the new Fourth Wave. We lot our coffee by village and let each coffee and each harvest essentially tell us how it wants to be roasted. We also daily pursue justice in all of our practices. As a Certified B Corp, we are held accountable for our environmental impact, labor practices, community development and more. Perhaps our hardest opinion of all is that if you treat farmers and their lands with love and respect you will get amazing coffee as a result.

Thanks for riding the waves with us today! Now go treat yourself to your favorite cuppa.