The Coffee Waves

When I was introduced to specialty coffee, industry people around me used the term “Third Wave” to describe it. The term became a subject of interest for me very quickly. Third Wave coffee, the kind I was interested in, was flavour-focused and authentic. It contrasted the First Wave, which was just about caffeine, and the Second Wave, which was centered around personalized flavouring of coffee, as epitomized by Starbucks.

With deeper digging I realized that the idea of coffee waves was not so cut-and-dried. Firstly, the terms had been coined multiple times with slightly different definitions for the waves. Secondly, the original definitions didn’t clearly match with each other, nor what I had been told about the waves. I decided to abandon the idea of coffee waves in favour of the term “specialty coffee,” which I found easier to define.

However, the question lingered for me about whether “waves” are a useful construct in discussing coffee culture. I have long debated trying to finally sort this question out for myself. I have attempted to make sense of it all a number of times, giving up after finding difficulty in reconciling the contradictory definitions. But I’ve decided to make another attempt.

So what is a wave? For the purposes of my analysis, a wave describes a distinct step in the evolution of coffee consumption and production.

The idea of coffee waves was introduced twice, independently.

Timothy J. Castle
The concept of the “Third Wave” was first posited first by Timothy J. Castle, apparently in 1999 (though, I couldn’t fine the original writing which can be found here). To summarize Castle:

-The First Wave saw the rise of packaged coffee. It homogenized coffee.
-The Second Wave was a reaction to the First. It emphasized freshness, quality, and variety. The companies from this era eventually promoted in-store consumption and espresso. Some also grew into large businesses.
-The Third Wave was a reaction to the Second. This wave emphasized quality to a greater degree. Third Wave companies aimed to stay small-scale compared to the Second Wave companies before them. They also began isolating coffees down to individual estates or lots.
-A Fourth Wave will be a reaction when the small companies from the Third Wave grow too large. Quality will continue to increase and farmers will be expected to create even more distinct flavour profiles. For Castle, this will also include barrel-aging coffee and collaborations with breweries.

For Castle, the waves are historical trends in coffee, where small companies pioneer increases in quality. Waves end when these companies grow larger, against their initial intentions, and a new wave of smaller businesses forms as a reaction, pushing the boundaries of coffee in some new way.

Trish Rothgeb & Nick Cho
While Castle first coined the term “Third Wave” and offered some interesting insight, his usage of the term arguably wasn’t the one accepted into the popular discussion of specialty coffee. In 2003, Trish Rothgeb (then Trish Skeie) separately coined the term in an article titled Norway and Coffee in The Flamekeeper newsletter for the Roasters Guild. The concept was further elaborated by Nick Cho in 2005.

For Rothgeb and Cho:
-The First Wave saw the rise of cheap, low-quality coffee.
-The Second Wave was “artisanal” and saw espresso proliferation, homogenization, freshness and automation. It was epitomized by Starbucks. For Cho, the Second Wave manipulated coffee’s flavour to fit people’s preferences.
-The Third Wave was a reaction to homogenization and automation. It was taste-forward — “letting the coffee speak for itself,” as Cho said.

For Rothgeb and Cho, the waves are not only historical trends, but also unique philosophies.

The First Wave got coffee in people’s hands for the sake of caffeine. The second got it to them in their preferred way — consistent (homogenized), fast (espresso), and manipulated to suit the customer’s palate. The Third was then about appreciating the inherent qualities of each coffee.

History vs. Philosophy
Describing each wave from only a historical perspective, as Castle did, introduces two problems: commonality and temporality.

Each wave has characteristics in common. The First and Second share homogenization. The Second and Third value quality, freshness, and ethics. The Third Wave initially rebelled against automation, but now in some places embraces it, as the Second Wave did. If there is so much overlap in the characteristics of the coffee waves, then what really differentiates them from one another? It is the philosophy behind each one.

Each wave also exists concurrently. For example, Folgers instant (First Wave), Starbucks (Second Wave), and Tim Wendelboe (Third Wave) are all happening right now.

Discussing each wave as a distinct philosophy conveniently eliminates these problems. The waves can share characteristics in their implementation, and each wave can exist at the same time.

Conclusion
To summarize the waves more succinctly, I would say:

The First Wave is about caffeine.

The Second Wave is about personalization.

The Third Wave is about discovery.

I think this summarizes well the colloquial usage of the terms in contemporary coffee conversation. The obvious next question is whether there will be a Fourth Wave, and if so, what its philosophy will be. This will be the subject of a future post.

Edit, May 22, 2025: Shortly after publishing this post I found a copy of the article in which Timothy J. Castle originally coined the term “Third Wave”. I edited the post to include a link to this article.

QC and the Current State of Roasting

Specialty coffee is the exploration of what makes each coffee unique. I think there is more uniqueness available in specialty coffees than we currently access. And I think roasting is the main barrier to this potential.

I regularly taste what are uncontroversially recognized as roast faults. Roasting isn’t easy. But I taste certain signs of underdevelopment in most specialty coffees. These are not one-off experiences, but regular occurrences. In my opinion, underdevelopment is still the norm in the industry.

How are we missing these flavours? Why am I tasting them, while other people aren’t? I believe the answer lies in our approach to quality control.

Brew Evenness
My Brewers’ Cup routine in 2017 led me down an evenness rabbit hole. I obsessed about finding the most even way to brew coffee. By my 2019 routine, I had gone even further. As I learned to brew more evenly, I tasted more and more of the flavours present in my coffee. It wasn’t always good. 

This is how I learned that evenness doesn’t always improve coffee. It simply shows you the coffee more transparently, whether its qualities are good or bad, and they’re often both. Brewing evenly will reveal roast faults if they exist.

I still prioritize evenness in my brewing, which tends to result in more juiciness and flavour clarity, but also tends to reveal any generic roast faults. The average bloomed V60 recipe is likely not brewing coffee evenly enough to highlight its flaws. This is great for daily enjoyment, but terrible for quality control. In quality control, hiding negative flavours is unhelpful. For QC you need to taste any negative flavours present in a coffee in order to find ways to fix them.

Bitter Hollowness
There is a flavour present in most specialty coffees I drink which I call “bitter hollowness”. I noticed this flavour in coffees a long time ago but didn’t have any terminology to define it, so that’s the phrase I came up with. I believe it is what Rob Hoos talks about in Modulating the Flavour Profile of Coffee when he describes the flavour of chlorogenic acids. Hoos’ book was the first time I heard anyone discuss this flavour, and frankly I still don’t hear people talking about it.

This hollowness is, for me, the most persistent underdeveloped flavour in the industry. I think we don’t look for it because we don’t talk about it. But once you taste it, it’s hard to stop noticing it. I think once we collectively get better at tasting this, we will collectively begin developing this generic flavour into unique ones instead. Or it may persist due to preferentialism.

Quality Control
Moving the conversation along, it seems clear that certain underdeveloped flavours make it through our quality control processes. Above I mentioned that evenness in brewing can reveal faults in our roasting. This makes evenness a great tool for quality control. If we can use evenness to reveal roast faults, then we can correct roast faults, which gives us more characterful coffees to brew.

I think the standard cupping method used widely in QC is also partly to blame for persistent underdevelopment. The cupping protocol was designed to taste a lot of coffees at once. It was not designed to optimally root out all roast faults so that they can more easily be fixed in the roast. I think with some creativity, the cupping protocol can be tweaked in order to better serve this purpose. I will leave the details for another time.

There are also roasting techniques that can increase evenness and create lower risk of underdevelopment, but I won’t get into those here.

Conclusion
Highlighting each coffee’s uniqueness should be the goal of specialty coffee. As we find better ways to stop hiding faults in our QC processes, we will begin to discover more of every coffee’s character. It is through tasting our coffee in QC that we identify the generic faults to be corrected. Therefore, we must use QC to taste everything there in order that we can optimize our coffee.

Contrasting Optimalism

In a recent blog post I discussed optimalism, the roasting philosophy behind my roastery Faultless. I thought it would be useful to also explain why I think this roasting philosophy is unique. For this purpose, I want to contrast it to what I believe are the other most common approaches to roasting.

I’ll start by re-summarizing. The goal of optimalism is to best find the unique character in each coffee. It does so by defining generic flavours — flavours that can be found in any coffee, and are therefore not unique — and subsequently avoiding those generic flavours. What remains is the distinct flavour potential of every coffee.

How is this different from what other roasters are doing? Many roasteries would say they are doing something similar. The idea of avoiding roast faults isn’t unique, and it is a goal common amongst specialty coffee roasters. So how does optimalism actually differ?

It is when we get into the details that we begin to see differences.

Method Roasting
Perhaps the most obvious difference is what I call method roasting. This is where a coffee is roasted with a specific brewing method in mind. Here, the roast profile is altered to accommodate for some aspect of the intended brewing method. Broadly, this comes in two forms: espresso roasting and filter roasting.

Espresso brewing tends to highlight acidity because it is such a concentrated and intense beverage. As a result, the intention with espresso roasts is often to dull acidity in some way to make the acidity of the resulting espresso more agreeable. However, in doing so I find that there is usually a compromise. Dulling acidity comes at a cost. Some flavour in the acidity is lost. Meanwhile, generic roast flavours are introduced with over-heating (e.g. over-caramelization, ash, flatness, etc.). Besides, most specialty coffee drinkers are likely to enjoy intense acidity in their espresso. If they don’t, then they will likely take their espresso in milk or as an americano anyways.

Filter roasting tends to fall into the trap of minimalism. In roasting, minimalism is the idea that the less we roast a coffee, the more character we preserve. This leads to brighter coffees, often with lighter body. However, this approach also tends to leave generic flavours in the coffee from under-roasting (e.g. grassiness, vegetal flavours, green bitterness, etc.). In order to fully find the uniqueness in a coffee, these generic flavours must actually be developed into their potential, making minimalism a bit of a fallacy.

Omni-Roasting
There is also the case of omni-roasting, where a coffee is roasted to be suitable for both espresso and filter brewing. I consider optimalism a form of omni-roasting. However, I would say there are still common issues with omni-roasting. Many omni-roasts have the same flaws as either espresso or filter roasting, or even both. Omni-roasts, in my experience, tend to be typical espresso or filter roasts but with a different name, and in some cases they simply include the roast faults from both.

Preferentialism
One last issue I see in coffee roasting is the idea of manipulating favours according to preference. This happens when a roaster likes a particular flavour in a coffee and tries to highlight it. We’ll call this preferentialism. This often comes at the cost of other flavours that would be indicative of a coffee’s character, and typically causes some generic flavour as a result. For instance, a roaster may try to highlight a coffee’s acidity by developing a coffee less, leaving less sweet flavours for the acidity to compete with. This might “highlight” the acidity, but in place of sweetness there will be some generic under-roasted flavour.

Guessing and Checking
Finally, one major benefit of optimalism is that it provides a very clear roadmap to characterful results through the principal of elimination. Rather than guessing and checking by testing out a few random roast profiles on a coffee, the elimination of faults makes dialling in a roast more obvious. When guessing and checking it might be hard to know whether a coffee has been roasted to its full potential. There isn’t a much to go off except knowing that one profile is more pleasing than another. Defining faults and eliminating them gives a much clearer standard.

Conclusion
Certainly there are other approaches that retain or introduce generic flavours in coffee roasting. These are simply what I view as the most common in specialty coffee right now. The problem I am always trying to avoid is generic flavours, as they get in the way of expressiveness.

Rather than focusing on the brew method, optimalism focuses on the flavour in the coffee itself. The premise is that only characterful flavours are left in the coffee in the first place, regardless of how it is later to be brewed.

I hope this contrast with other roasting approaches highlights what makes optimalism a distinct roasting philosophy.