Connoisseurs break coffee’s development and cultural significance into three “waves.” I’m going to use something a little like Hegelian dialectics to show how coffee has evolved and where it is going. I add a preliminary zeroth wave and continue through to a prediction about a fourth wave based on how each wave creates a market vulnerability or weakness that is improved upon in the following wave. The weaknesses partly result from the very thing that was an improvement over the previous wave.
I have a hunch that this kind of analysis might open up avenues to accelerate the innovation of new products and product lines.
Zeroth Wave Coffee
Humans discover coffee via goat and start doing funny things with it. Brewing methods are developed all over the world with various results. In its earliest days, coffee was single origin and organic because it came from a single place (Ethiopia, then Yemen) while animal husbandry was developed, but without a knowledge of genetics, and soil and fertilization management were still based on manure, crop rotation, and irrigation. Arabica was probably the first. Robusta, from the lower, Western side of Africa, was later brought into service. While we don’t have records and formulations, people no doubt made very good coffee. Our ancestors were way more sophisticated than we give them credit for.
Zeroth Ripple Coffee: Explorations of brewing methods probably quickly took us from eating coffee beans to boiling it, a la “cowboy coffee” or in a cezve.
The Market Weaknesses of Zeroth Wave Coffee are that it was expensive and inconsistent. Cultivation would have been in its early stages.
First Wave Coffee
First Wave Coffee resolved the Market Weaknesses of Zeroth Wave Coffee through industrialization, which brought consistency, better distribution and typically lower costs. First Wave Coffee is red can or blue can. Also, green can and yellow can for you MJB and Chock Full O’ Nuts rebels, you.
One way to get consistency out of an industrialized botanical product is to blend it, as is done with red wines. “Colombian grown.” You know: Colombia. (It’s more than twice the size of France.) But, nobody gets too crazy about it. First Wave Coffee is similar to blended red wine in that it can be enjoyable-ish while it does a specific job.
Tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen, and pour yourself a cup of ambition.
Consistency is most appropriate for industrial foods, like soda or sports drinks. Because coffee is a living, botanical thing, a varietal, consistency erodes its qualities, especially the complexity of its flavor. The toughest thing about Popeye the Sailor is that he can stomach canned spinach. Intense industrialization produces Food Tools.
First Ripple Coffee: Instant Coffee. Hyper-industrialization reduces coffee into a Food Tool. Instant “tastes just like real coffee,” which wasn’t even what coffee could be.(As I live and breathe, is that Blanche Devereaux?)
To be fair, instant coffee serves several purposes, much of which derive from its primary source: Robusta. Robusta grows at lower elevations where climates are more predictable and abundant. Think of a mountain as a cone. This inherently leads to lower costs as more land can be put under cultivation.
A general rule in coffee cultivation is that an appropriate elevation is inversely related to the distance from the equator. While all coffee grows in or up against the tropics, the closer you get to the equator, the higher up you have to be to grow coffee. While Robusta originated in Africa, most of it today is grown in the Pacific, particularly Indochina.
Robusta is a tougher plant than Arabica, the other primary coffee species (of almost 200). It resists rust disease, drought, and will grow in lower-quality soil.
Instant coffee is more shelf-stable and compact than whole bean or ground coffee, which further satisfies industrializations’ “desires” for durable, easily transported goods. Brewing only takes the same kettle that tea, soups, and other foods require. You don’t need some fancy-pants brewing setup. All this makes instant coffee especially common in poor countries, though it is more popular in Israel, a rich country, than it is in America because of its much smaller average residential dwellings (105 vs 213 sq meters), and therefore room for kitchen appliances.
The development of flavored creamers begins in the First Wave, notably with International Delights, which combines flavored, powdered creamers with instant coffee. Oh, Jean-Luc.
The Market Weakness of First Wave Coffee is that its industrial processes disrespect drinkers’ taste buds.
Next Up: The Second And Third Waves