The State of American Coffee Before Specialty
To understand why the specialty coffee movement mattered, it is necessary to understand what it replaced. By the 1960s, American coffee culture had settled into a commodified low point.
The post-World War II American coffee market was dominated by a handful of large corporations: Folgers (owned by Procter & Gamble), Maxwell House (General Foods), and Hills Bros. These companies competed primarily on price, not quality. To maintain margins as coffee prices fluctuated, they progressively increased the proportion of lower-grade robusta beans in their blends, reduced roast quality, and encouraged consumers to brew weaker cups by recommending lower coffee-to-water ratios.
Instant coffee, introduced commercially by Nestle as Nescafe in 1938, captured an increasing share of the American market through the 1950s and 1960s. By the mid-1960s, instant coffee accounted for roughly one-third of all coffee consumed in the United States. Freeze-dried instant, introduced by Nestle and General Foods in the mid-1960s, further expanded the segment.
The result was a coffee landscape defined by lowest-common-denominator products. Coffee was cheap, bitter, stale, and largely interchangeable between brands. Per capita consumption in the United States began a long decline starting in the 1960s, as younger consumers increasingly chose soft drinks over what they perceived as their parents’ bitter, unpleasant beverage.
It was against this background that a small number of individuals began to insist that coffee could be, and should be, something fundamentally better.
Alfred Peet: The Godfather of Specialty Coffee
Alfred Peet was born in 1920 in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, to a family involved in the coffee trade. His father worked for a major Dutch coffee company, and young Alfred grew up around coffee roasting, cupping, and the European tradition of fresh-roasted, quality-focused coffee. He spent years in the coffee trade in Indonesia, then the world’s third-largest producer, before emigrating to the United States in 1955.
What Peet found in America appalled him. The coffee was, by European standards, terrible: stale, over-roasted in industrial drum roasters for consistency rather than quality, and brewed without care. Peet spent a decade working in the American coffee import business, growing increasingly frustrated with the industry’s indifference to quality.
On April 1, 1966, Peet opened Peet’s Coffee, Tea & Spices at 2124 Vine Street in Berkeley, California. The shop was small, unassuming, and revolutionary. Peet roasted beans on-site in small batches, offered them for sale as fresh whole beans (at a time when almost all retail coffee was pre-ground), and brewed coffee to a standard that most Americans had never experienced.
Peet’s roasting style was distinctly dark, influenced by the Indonesian coffees he had grown up with and the European tradition of full-bodied, deeply roasted blends. His approach was uncompromising: he sourced the best arabica beans he could find, roasted them with care, and sold them fresh. He was often gruff with customers, insisting they buy only what they would consume within a week.
The Berkeley location became a pilgrimage site for coffee enthusiasts. Peet trained a generation of young roasters and entrepreneurs who would go on to shape the industry, including Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker, who in 1971 opened the first Starbucks store in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, modeled explicitly on Peet’s approach. Peet himself served as a mentor and supplier to the early Starbucks, and his influence on the company’s founding culture is direct and acknowledged.
Erna Knutsen and the Naming of Specialty Coffee
If Alfred Peet demonstrated that quality coffee could be a viable business, Erna Knutsen gave the movement its name and its conceptual framework.
Erna Knutsen was born in 1921 in Norway and emigrated to the United States as a young woman. She entered the coffee trade in San Francisco, working as a secretary at B.C. Ireland, a coffee brokerage firm. Despite having no formal role in coffee buying, Knutsen developed an acute palate and a deep interest in the characteristics of individual coffee lots. She began cupping samples alongside the professional buyers and quickly proved that she could evaluate coffee as well as anyone in the firm.
By the early 1970s, Knutsen had become a respected broker in her own right, specializing in small lots of exceptional quality from specific regions, farms, and microclimates. In 1974, she used the term “specialty coffee” in an article for the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, marking the first known use of the phrase in print.
Knutsen’s definition was geographic and qualitative: specialty coffees were produced in specific microclimates that yielded beans with unique and distinctive flavor profiles. The concept was radical for its time. The commodity coffee industry treated coffee as a bulk product, differentiated only by broad origin categories (Brazilian, Colombian, Robusta) and graded primarily by defect count. Knutsen’s framework insisted that individual lots from specific places could, and should, be evaluated on their sensory merits.
This was not mere terminology. By naming the concept, Knutsen provided a rallying point for a growing community of roasters, importers, and consumers who shared a commitment to quality. The term “specialty coffee” became the identity marker for an industry within an industry.
Knutsen continued brokering exceptional coffees for decades, working with small roasters across the United States. She was known for her sharp palate, her colorful personality, and her willingness to advocate loudly for the coffee farmers who produced the lots she sold. She received the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award and remained active in the trade into her nineties. She died in 2018 at age 96.
Early Starbucks: Before the Empire
The original Starbucks, opened on March 30, 1971, at 2000 Western Avenue in Seattle (later relocated to 1912 Pike Place), was not the global chain it would become. It was a small retail shop selling fresh-roasted whole bean coffee and brewing equipment, modeled directly on Peet’s Coffee in Berkeley.
Founders Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker were all influenced by Peet. Baldwin and Bowker had visited Peet’s and been converted to the idea that fresh-roasted, high-quality arabica coffee could be a viable retail business. Peet himself supplied roasted beans to the early Starbucks and trained Baldwin in roasting.
For its first decade, Starbucks was a roaster-retailer, not a coffeehouse. It sold beans, not beverages. It had a single location, then a handful. It was a local Seattle institution, admired by coffee enthusiasts but unknown nationally.
The transformation came in 1982 when Howard Schultz joined as director of retail operations and marketing. After a 1983 trip to Italy, where he was inspired by Milan’s espresso bar culture, Schultz became convinced that Starbucks should sell prepared beverages, not just beans. Baldwin and the other founders disagreed, preferring to remain a roaster-retailer.
Schultz left to start his own espresso bar company, Il Giornale, in 1985. In 1987, he acquired Starbucks from the original founders for $3.8 million and merged the two companies. Under Schultz’s leadership, Starbucks rapidly expanded into the espresso-bar chain that would define the second wave of coffee.
The pre-Schultz Starbucks matters to the specialty coffee origin story because it demonstrates the movement’s early commercial model: small-scale, quality-focused, artisanal, and rooted in the belief that Americans could be educated to appreciate better coffee. That model, not the chain model that followed, was the original expression of specialty coffee retail.
George Howell and the Quality Revolution
George Howell’s contributions to specialty coffee are among the most consequential in the movement’s history. Born in 1944, Howell studied art and literature before entering the coffee business. In 1975, he opened The Coffee Connection in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a shop that combined quality roasting with an educational approach to coffee.
Howell’s distinctive contribution was his relentless focus on cup quality as an objective, measurable standard. He was among the first specialty coffee figures to argue that coffee should be evaluated with the same rigor applied to wine: systematic sensory analysis, attention to origin and terroir, and transparent quality scoring.
In the early 1990s, Howell co-developed the Cup of Excellence program, a competition and auction system designed to identify and reward the best coffees from producing countries. The first Cup of Excellence competition was held in Brazil in 1999, organized through the Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE), a nonprofit that Howell helped establish alongside Susie Spindler.
The Cup of Excellence model was transformative. Winning coffees were auctioned online to the highest bidder, creating a direct link between exceptional quality and premium prices. For the first time, small producers in countries like Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, and Guatemala could receive prices many times the commodity market rate for coffees that scored highly in blind evaluations.
The program’s influence extended beyond the auctions themselves. Cup of Excellence established a standardized cupping protocol that became a benchmark for quality evaluation, influenced the development of the SCA cupping form, and created a culture of competitive quality improvement among producers.
Howell sold The Coffee Connection to Starbucks in 1994 (Starbucks wanted the rights to the Frappuccino, which Howell had developed), but he returned to the coffee business in 2004 with George Howell Coffee, focused on direct-trade, terroir-driven sourcing with extreme traceability.
The SCAA: Institutionalizing a Movement
By the early 1980s, the specialty coffee community had grown large enough to require institutional structure. In 1982, a group of coffee professionals, including roasters, importers, and retailers, founded the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) in San Francisco.
The SCAA’s founding members included many of the movement’s key figures. The organization’s early goals were to define quality standards, provide education and training, and create a trade show where the growing specialty community could connect.
The SCAA annual conference and exhibition became the industry’s central gathering. The cupping standards developed and refined by the SCAA (later SCA, after the 2017 merger with the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe) provided a common language for quality evaluation. The SCAA’s work on defining the 80-point threshold for specialty coffee, based on a 100-point cupping scale, gave the term “specialty coffee” a concrete, measurable definition.
The Q Grader program, developed by the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI, a nonprofit established by the SCAA in 1996), created a credentialing system for professional coffee evaluators. Licensed Q Graders underwent rigorous sensory training and calibration, ensuring that quality assessments were consistent and reliable across the industry. The Q Grader credential became the coffee industry’s equivalent of a wine sommelier certification.
The Roaster Wave of the 1980s and 1990s
The infrastructure built by Peet, Knutsen, Howell, the SCAA, and others enabled an explosion of small-batch specialty roasters in the 1980s and 1990s. These companies, operating in cities across the United States and increasingly in Europe, Australia, and Asia, embodied the specialty movement’s values.
Companies like Stumptown Coffee Roasters (Portland, 1999), Intelligentsia Coffee (Chicago, 1995), and Counter Culture Coffee (Durham, 1995) became flagbearers of a new approach. They sourced directly from farms, paid premium prices, roasted lighter to preserve origin character, and invested in barista training and consumer education. These roasters, along with dozens of others, built the commercial foundation for what would later be called the third wave.
The movement’s growth was not purely American. In Europe, roasters like Tim Wendelboe (Oslo), Square Mile Coffee Roasters (London, co-founded by James Hoffmann), and The Barn (Berlin) advanced the same principles. In Australia, a distinctive specialty coffee culture emerged in Melbourne and Sydney. In Asia, specialty movements developed in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, and Bangkok.
From Movement to Industry
The specialty coffee movement’s arc from the 1960s through the early 2000s traces a path from eccentric idealism to mainstream commercial force. What began as a handful of obsessives insisting that coffee could taste better became a global industry segment valued in the tens of billions of dollars.
The movement’s core ideas, that origin matters, that freshness matters, that quality can be measured and rewarded, that the supply chain from farm to cup should be transparent and equitable, proved to be durable commercial propositions. They survived the co-optation of “specialty” language by mainstream brands, the corporatization of early specialty companies (Starbucks acquired The Coffee Connection; Peet’s was bought by JAB Holding in 2012; Stumptown and Intelligentsia were acquired by Peet’s parent company), and the ongoing tension between artisanal ideals and commercial scale.
The specialty coffee movement did not solve the coffee industry’s deep structural problems: low farmgate prices, climate vulnerability, the legacy of colonial extraction, and inequitable value distribution along the supply chain. But it created a framework, a vocabulary, and a consumer base that could begin to address those problems. That framework started with Peet’s stubborn insistence on quality in a Berkeley shop, Knutsen’s naming of an idea, Howell’s codification of standards, and a small association’s decision to define what “specialty” meant.