The Three Waves of Coffee
If you have ever wondered why one coffee shop sells a dollar cup of something brown from a glass carafe, another sells a caramel-drizzled venti behind a mermaid logo, and a third sells a $6 single-origin pour-over with tasting notes about bergamot, you have seen all three waves of coffee crashing on the same street. The “waves” framework was coined in 2002 by Trish Rothgeb, a roaster and green-coffee buyer who used it in a trade newsletter to describe three successive movements in American coffee — and, somewhat to her surprise, the phrase escaped the industry and became the standard way of telling coffee’s modern history. Like all tidy frameworks it flattens some things, and the waves overlap rather than replace each other (all three are alive and pouring today). But it remains genuinely useful, because each wave answered a different question. The first asked: how do we get coffee to everyone? The second: how do we make coffee an experience? The third: how good can coffee actually be?
The first wave: coffee for everyone
The first wave is the story of coffee becoming a household staple, and it runs roughly from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. Coffee had been drunk in America since colonial tea went overboard in Boston, but it was the industrial era that put it on every table: national roasting brands like Folgers and Maxwell House (“good to the last drop,” a slogan dubiously attributed to Theodore Roosevelt), vacuum-sealed tins that let pre-ground coffee sit on grocery shelves indefinitely, and instant coffee, which boomed after being packed into soldiers’ rations in both world wars. This was a genuine democratic triumph — cheap, consistent, available coffee for an entire continent, brewed in percolators and later in the auto-drip machines that conquered mid-century kitchens.
It was also, by any sensory standard, a race to the bottom. Coffee was traded as a pure commodity, priced by the ton and advertised by brand rather than origin; quality was engineered downward decade by decade as producers stretched blends with cheap Robusta and consumers learned to expect bitterness as the taste of coffee itself. Nobody talked about where beans came from, because it did not matter — the tin was the terroir. By the 1960s, American per-capita coffee consumption was actually declining, and the stage was set for a correction.
The second wave: coffee as experience
The correction arrived with a Dutch immigrant named Alfred Peet, who had grown up in the coffee trade in Holland and was appalled by what Americans were drinking. Peet’s Coffee, opened in Berkeley in 1966, introduced a radical proposition: dark-roasted, freshly roasted coffee from named origins, sold by people who could tell you about it. Three of Peet’s disciples — literally trained by him, initially selling beans he roasted — founded a Seattle shop in 1971 and named it Starbucks. It sold only whole beans until Howard Schultz, hired in the early 1980s, came back from a trip to Milan transfixed by Italian espresso bars and eventually transformed the company into a chain of cafes. The second wave had found its engine.
What the second wave sold was less the coffee than everything around it: the Italian vocabulary of espresso, lattes, and cappuccinos; the barista as a job title; and above all the cafe as what Schultz called the “third place” between home and work — an idea the Ottomans had pioneered under a different arithmetic four centuries earlier, but which postwar America had almost entirely lost. It worked staggeringly well. Starbucks grew from 17 stores in 1987 to thousands worldwide within a decade and taught an entire generation that coffee could cost four dollars, that milk drinks came in sizes named in pidgin Italian, and that origins like Sumatra and Kenya were words worth printing on a menu. The second wave’s signature dark roast was both a genuine aesthetic (Peet’s legacy) and a practical convenience — heavy roasting homogenizes beans and hides defects, which suits a company buying at massive scale. That trade-off became the next wave’s opening argument.
The third wave: coffee as craft
By the late 1990s a loose network of small roasters — Intelligentsia in Chicago, Counter Culture in Durham, Stumptown in Portland are the usually-cited big three — had begun treating coffee less like a beverage business and more like winemaking. This is the movement Rothgeb named the third wave, and its premise was that coffee is an agricultural product with terroir: a Yirgacheffe and a Huila are as different as a Burgundy and a Barossa, and everything between farm and cup should preserve that difference rather than roast over it. In practice that meant buying single-origin lots traceable to a farm or cooperative, often through “direct trade” relationships that paid growers far above commodity price; roasting lighter to reveal origin character instead of darker to impose house character; and brewing with the fanaticism of a chemistry lab — scales, timers, controlled water, and the revival of manual methods like the pour-over that the auto-drip era had abandoned.
The third wave also rebuilt coffee’s culture of expertise. Barista championships, cupping scores, the Specialty Coffee Association’s standards, Q graders, and the tasting-note vocabulary that adorns modern bags all date from this era, as does the market for once-obscure treasures like Panama Geisha, which third-wave auction culture turned into the most expensive coffee on earth. At its best, the movement raised quality and grower incomes together and taught drinkers that coffee could be genuinely, startlingly delicious. At its worst it curdled into self-parody — the sneering barista, the $7 cup served with a lecture — and its economics remain harder than its rhetoric: even direct trade has not solved the poverty of most of the world’s smallholder coffee farmers.
Is there a fourth wave? People have been announcing one for years, variously defined as the scientific turn (refractometers and extraction theory), the corporatization of craft (Peet’s now owns Stumptown and Intelligentsia; Nestlé bought a majority stake in Blue Bottle), or the rise of producing countries as consuming countries with specialty scenes of their own. None of the definitions has stuck, which may be the point — the wave metaphor described a market growing up, and the growing up is largely done. What is certain is that all three waves persist, comfortably stratified: the supermarket tin, the caramel macchiato, and the bergamot-scented pour-over each outsell the more refined wave that followed it. Coffee’s history has never worked by replacement, only by addition — a truth as old as the Sufis and their qahwa.
Frequently asked questions
Who coined the term “third wave coffee”? Trish Rothgeb, a roaster and green-coffee buyer, first used the term in a 2002 article for the Roasters Guild newsletter, describing three successive movements in American coffee culture.
What is the difference between second wave and third wave coffee? The second wave (Peet’s, Starbucks) made coffee an experience — espresso drinks, dark roasts, the cafe as a “third place.” The third wave treats coffee as a craft product like wine: single origins, lighter roasts, direct trade, and precision brewing aimed at expressing where the coffee was grown.
Is Starbucks second wave or third wave? Second wave, definitively — it built its empire on dark-roasted blends and Italian-style milk drinks. Its Reserve program borrows third-wave trappings (single origins, manual brewing), but the company is the second wave’s defining institution.
Is there a fourth wave of coffee? It gets proposed regularly — the science-driven turn, craft brands bought by conglomerates, booming specialty scenes in producing countries — but no definition has achieved consensus. For now, “third wave” still describes the current craft era.