From Kev @ coffeeblog. Did You Know? How Speciality Coffee Began

Hello   Kev here :-), Did You Know? How Speciality Coffee Came About.   This is Erna Knutson, and she single-handedly started the speciality coffee movement back in the 70s. Wait, speciality coffee is a movement? Absolutely! Many people see speciality coffee as merely a label. If it says speciality on it then it means it's scored over 80 by SCA approved Q-graders. While this technical classification is true, this is simply the efforts that have been made to preserve the speciality coffee market, this isn't all that speciality coffee is. What speciality coffee is, is a movement away from coffee purely as a commodity, a movement away from the huge coffee business, towards special characterful coffees. It started much earlier than most people think, and it's mainly down to one amazing woman. Erna was a secretary for a coffee importer (B.C. Ireland) in San Francisco, but she had a real passion for coffee, and she happened upon a particularly unusual lot (Sumatra Mandheling), and managed to convince the boss to buy a container of it.  He said yes but only if she would commit to being able to sell it, which she said she would (she did, no worries). The problem was, at this time, being a woman, she wasn't even allowed in the cupping room! When she brought the supplier with the Sumatra Mandheling in to the office and convinced him to let them cup the sample (which was intended for a New York buyer) she had to stay in her admin cubicle and wait for someone to bring her a sample! When the salesmen learned that this young lady (apparently, some of them used much less polite language than that) was going to be allowed to sell, some threatened that they'd quit before they let that happen. They were clearly scared of her, and they were right to be. About 10 years later, she took over the company and sacked them all! I'm not entirely sure how much truth there is in the sacking them all bit ;-), it's something she said in jest a few times when giving talks, but "many a true word said in jest", and she did indeed end up owning the company. I've kind of jumped to the end of the story there ;-), but Erna discovered something that were referred to as broken lots, smaller quantities of beans from smaller producers often in high altitude microclimates, that didn't fill a container.  At that time most of the coffee was roasted by just a handful of HUGE roasting businesses, in fact around 70% of market was sewn up by just 4 roasters. They blasted through full containers of coffee beans for fun, and they were usually working on microscopic margins (which works when you're doing such massive volumes) so they certainly wouldn't have been interested in paying more for special beans. The small batch roasters at the time were referred to as the small trade, they had very little buying power, most traders had no interest in dealing with them.  Erna saw an opportunity in putting these two minorities together to create an entirely new market, convincing small batch roasters to pay more for special beans (which she referred to as her "gems"). What she was pioneering was what we now know as the speciality coffee market. Everything we see now in speciality coffee, including the relationship based trading and the focus on sustainability, was all started by Erna.  At that time, the commodity coffee buyers didn't go to origin to visit the producers, if a rep did go to origin it was usually to do business with banks & brokers, but Erna believed in having a direct relationship on both sides of the business, so she wanted to get to know the producers. In fact at one cupping meeting, Erna (who was known for her quick whit and her loud & infectious laugh) had scored one sample much higher than everyone else around the cupping table. When she was asked why, she put her glasses on, looked at her cupping notes and exclaimed "Oh, I'm sleeping with the farmer!" ;-). For more on this see: Speciality Coffee - More Than Just a Label! So the next time you're drinking a stonking cup of really special coffee, just give a little nod to this extraordinary woman, without whom you may not even realise that coffee can taste this good! I hope you enjoyed this edition of Brew Time, and I'll see you next week :-).  Thanks again, Kev coffeeblog.co.uk cworks.co.uk Follow me on Twitter Follow me on Instagram Follow me on Facebook Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Become an Accredited Coffee Botherer

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