In the beginning, there was a Norwegian woman. That's right, that's how it was. To start talking about specialty coffee, we have to go back to its origin, which began in Northern Norway. A name is key in this story: Erna Knutsen.

Erna Knutsen, who was born in Bodø (1921) and emigrated with her family to the United States (1926), was the one who created and popularized the term “specialty coffee”. The story of Erna is extraordinary and inspiring.

Having spent Erna’s first childhood years in Northern Norway, the Knutsen family, due to the economic depression that followed World War I, was forced to leave the country and take a ship of no return to New York.

The family spent the rest of Erna’s childhood in the neighborhoods of Queens and Brooklyn, living with many other immigrants. Although her family lived humbly, she used to say that the aromas of her neighborhood were “heavenly”. She always remembered the delicious smells coming from her neighbors' kitchen when they cooked Italian food and the aroma of the fresh ground coffee her mother used to brew every morning for the family.

Years later, at that time, Erna realized that it was not easy to develop as a young woman. Seeing that her growth possibilities were very limited, she married her boyfriend of those years when she was only 18 because, as she said, it was the only way for a girl to get out of her house. Some time later she would divorce and marry another two times later in her life.

As a young independent woman, Erna started working as a secretary. She would make a 30-year career working in that position at different companies (in banks, law firms, and even on Wall Street). After having moved to San Francisco in the 1950’s, she took a job as secretary for Bert Fulmer of the B.C. Ireland Coffee Company INC. (1968), an importer of “Spices, Seeds, Tapiocas, Peanuts, Herbs, Rice and All Oriental Merchandise”. Working for a green beans importer, she got a first look at the coffee industry and gained a deep understanding of the coffee market structure and the principles of the coffee trade. Later, in 1973, she managed to break the gender barrier and obtained a seat at the tasting table, becoming the first female taster in the US.

As a secretary at B.C. Ireland, one of her tasks was keeping the position book, tracking the “transit” (purchases and sales) of coffee lots as they came and went (in fact, her role went far beyond that of a secretary). At that time, it was a common practice to blend many different origins and qualities to achieve the great volumes required by the big roasting companies. Coffee was appreciated as “just another commodity”, so importers made their profit only through sales of large volumes at expense of quality. At that point, the average coffee quality was so low that it was even impossible to distinguish between instant and filtered coffee. But some small roasters realized that some coffee drinkers were very bored and unsatisfied with the traditional product. They were interested in tasting a different coffee quality and were willing to pay more for it. But these roasters were not able to fill entire containers with these green beans.

Erna recognized this trend and saw an opportunity in the “small trade”. She noticed that some coffee lots could be “rescued” from being blended for the exclusive use of the big roasting companies and could be sold, due to their quality, in smaller quantities but at a higher price to an emerging group of local, non-industrial, small-scale roasters along the West Coast.

To easily explain the product she was sourcing and selling, Erna used the term “specialty coffee” for the very first time during an interview with the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal in 1974. She described specialty coffee as “beans of the best flavor which are produced in special micro-climates”. Although this is a first, very generic definition, it would serve as a basis not only to name this surging segment of the coffee industry but also to later develop all the defining criteria for specialty coffees.

Erna built a reputation as a proficient coffee cupper in B.C. Ireland and a trusted green coffee broker among small-scale roasters. This allowed her to climb positions and make her way from her starting position as secretary to vice president and later president of the importing company. In 1985, the year of the company’s 100th anniversary, Erna accomplished the promise she had declared in 1975: that she would buy B.C. Ireland (and fire the men). That year, the B.C. Ireland Coffee Company ceased activities and got renamed. Knutsen Coffees LTD. was born.

Erna dedicated the rest of her career to Knutsen Coffees. She traveled to many countries and established strong partnerships with coffee producers and exporters. She actively worked in her company until her last years and was always committed to building an international community of people devoted to high-quality coffee. She was a founding member of the SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America). With her company, she became one of the most recognized coffee importers in the US and showed, with her perseverance, that the naysayers were wrong. She passed away on June 16, 2018, at the age of 96.

Possibly, Erna was the first person to discover a new market niche that was emerging: coffee drinkers who demanded a more interesting and differentiated product, with more prominent flavors and aromas, a "less burnt" coffee; and small roasters willing to buy green coffee on a lower scale to roast it in an artisanal way and provide their customers with a more exclusive and higher quality product. Erna gave that niche a name: specialty coffee.

Secondly, Erna also glimpsed one of the causes of the higher quality of certain coffee lots: the micro-climates in which they are produced. The concept of micro-climate refers to a long series of geographical and meteorological factors in the production field that make a coffee unique: the number of daily hours of sunlight exposure, the presence of protective shade, temperatures and the variation among them, access to water sources, the effect of wind, height, etc. The awareness of these (and other) quality factors is the reason why we find this type of information on the label when we buy a specialty coffee nowadays.

We can use Erna's definition as a starting point to expand on other factors that are today openly recognized as determining for the higher quality of specialty coffees: post-harvest processing, respect for the specific origin and terroir, traceability, transparency, and sustainability. But each of these aspects has its own separate world and we will have time to explore them in other posts.