Third Wave vs Specialty Coffee: What it means and why it (really) matters

Third wave and Specialty coffee are terms being tossed all around the café, coffee shop world these days… but what do those terms actually mean? Is it just snobby marketing to give an excuse to charge more, or am I actually getting a higher quality product?

Maybe it’s something much deeper.

Our friends at FreshGround Roast in Geneva, Il., share some great information with us here in this quick video on the difference between third wave and specialty coffee, as well as a quick guide through coffee throughout the years, and even let us in on a little coffee connoisseur verbiage.

At Silk City Coffee Co., we pride ourselves in being the only – and dare we say, the best – specialty coffee company in Downtown Paterson NJ. But it’s not just where our coffee beans end up, it’s also about where they begin. For us, it’s important to empower coffee grower communities all over the world, to make sure that our practices and those of our partners are ethical, sustainable and provide opportunities for the coffee farmers and their families. Traditional ways of coffee export often involve exploit of third world coffee farmers, they and their families and communities surviving on less than a liveable wage.

This hurts the land, and the people.

To learn more about our mission for better coffee and sustainable relationships with coffee grower communities, click here.

Want to impress your friends with some coffee snob knowledge? Watch this 5 min blog video… best with a cup of Silk City Coffee Co in hand.

Ps. Did you hear?! We just launched our Coffee Connoisseur Club (C3), our specialty coffee subscription service! To get coffee delivered to your door whenever you want, just: 1. Choose your favorite roasts and grind preference,
2. Click on “Join our Coffee Connoisseur Club: Subscribe & Save 5%”
3. You decide when you want it to show up at your door! Check out and never have to worry about running out of coffee again. All while taking 5% off with each and every automatically recurring order. It’s that easy.