What Do We Call This Era of Coffee?

Without the right words, the value chain breaks.

Aug 24, 2025

Coffee has never been better.

Farmers are designing flavor, scientists are reshaping fermentation, importers are curating innovation. And yet for most people, coffee has never felt more confusing. Words like “specialty,” “craft,” or “single-origin” once promised clarity; now they blur together. Even roasters feel it—grasping for the right way to explain what we do, and what to call the era we’re living in.

Why the Old Names Don’t Work

“Specialty coffee” is too broad and misused.

“Nordic roasting” is obscure and geographically irrelevant.

“Third Wave” is dated, a moment that ended long ago.

“Modern coffee” might be the strongest contender—but it’s vague, and too trend-adjacent.

None of these fully capture what’s happening now.

After the Third Wave

The Third Wave was a course correction. Indie cafés, barista competitions, endless cuppings—it was an explosion of creativity that proved coffee could be more than a commodity. It gave us a new vocabulary—traceability, transparency, craft—and taught consumers to care about origin.

But its center of gravity was always with roasters and café brands. And as many of those sold to corporations, the energy dissipated. Its aesthetics were absorbed into corporate logic.

What’s left is harder to name. We’re not in the Third Wave anymore, but we’re not fully in something else either. The baseline has shifted: quality is higher, transparency is expected, and responsibility is shared across the chain. But the shape of what comes next is still blurry.

The Shape of What’s Emerging

Farms are becoming more sophisticated. Younger producers are experimenting with fermentation, drying, and varietals. Some are building reputations of their own.

Not Panama Geisha auctions with astronomical prices. The future looks more like Sebastián Ramírez in Colombia: a young farmer designing flavor through double fermentations, carbonic maceration, and anaerobic processing. Roasters like me aren’t inventing that—we’re curating, interpreting, and amplifying his work.

Thinkers like Lucia Solís, a former winemaker turned fermentation consultant, are re-orienting how we understand coffee. Her work isn’t about chasing “wild” flavors, but giving producers tools to control their destinies and broaden what’s possible at origin.

New connectors are emerging too. Unblended, based in Colombia, helped put Ramírez on the map with roasters abroad. They’re not only supporting producers on the ground, but also acting as tastemakers—deciding which coffees get visibility. In the old model, importers were logistics. Now they are curators of innovation.

They’re not alone. Small importers like Semilla Coffee and Shared Source are building long-term relationships and shaping narratives of quality.

Together, these actors—farmers like Ramírez, thinkers like Solís, connectors like Unblended—are sketching the outlines of a new value chain. One where origin doesn’t just supply raw material, but defines quality, authorship, and taste itself.

The Crisis of Language

We don’t have a name for this chain. And without language, we don’t have clarity.

That lack of clarity runs all the way through. Farmers, scientists, and importers are pushing the boundaries of what coffee can be. But without a shared way of talking about this value, it gets lost in translation.

On the roasting side, the shorthand has become: we buy expensive coffee and roast it light. But that’s too broad. It’s too easy to claim, which is why some roasters now print their green prices on the bag to prove themselves. That only confuses customers more—and doesn’t solve the deeper problem of how to communicate value.

On the consumer side, let’s be honest: the average café customer isn’t lining up for a $9 pour-over that’s hit or miss depending on who’s on bar. Some cafés are experimenting with turbo shots of their “single-origin” lots. But even that phrase feels dated. For us, single-origin isn’t a mark of distinction—it’s the standard.

When the Words Lose Power

Coffee has always depended on language to carry value. But many of the words that once did the heavy lifting no longer land.

Single-origin was a badge of distinction. Today, it’s baseline.
Craft promised care and precision. Today, it’s stamped on potato chips.
Specialty began as a technical grade. Today, it’s stretched thin.
Direct trade was a rallying cry. Today, it’s anyone with an exporter’s email.

Each of these once created clarity. Today, they create noise. And when the language goes stale, consumers stop trusting it—and companies lose their compass.

If we can’t explain what makes this coffee different—why it matters, why it costs what it does—then the work happening at origin risks being commodified, just like before. Value chains without clarity don’t hold.

Beyond Curator: Defining Our Role

So how do we strengthen the chain? By acting less like isolated businesses and more like a scene. Like musicians in a new genre, we push each other forward, borrow, remix, compete, admire.

I think about Proud Mary in Austin, who build menus that frame coffee as intentional journeys. Or WatchHouse in London, who’ve built an identity around “modern coffee” and exude clarity without jargon. La Cabra makes omni-roasting feel legible. April Coffee experiments with presentation and design. Onyx has pushed transparency and immersive media further than almost anyone.

We’re fans of each other. And like music, this scene doesn’t yet have a fixed name—but you can feel its shape in the way we all keep circling the same questions: How do we communicate value? How do we make it durable? How do we keep coffee from collapsing back into commodity?

At Seekers, our way of communicating that value, and making it durable, is through three tools of translation:

Beauty frames the farmer’s work so it resonates. A menu, a cup, even a tasting note—all can make invisible labor visible. Beauty turns agricultural detail into cultural meaning.

Service carries clarity across the counter. It’s how a $9 cup doesn’t feel arbitrary, but understood. Service guides people through choices, creates consistency, and ensures they leave both delighted and confident in what they paid.

Wisdom decides what to highlight and what to let go. It’s discernment in choosing which lots deserve the spotlight, how to price them, and which stories to tell. Wisdom keeps us from chasing trends and protects the chain from collapsing back into commodity.

Together, these tools are how we translate the chain—how we carry the farmer’s experiment, the scientist’s insight, and the importer’s curation into culture, so value doesn’t get lost, but endures.

What Do We Call It?

Every new genre of music eventually earns a name. Punk, jazz, hip-hop—none of those words were obvious at the start. They came later, after enough artists pushed and pulled in the same direction, and listeners needed a way to talk about what they were hearing.

Coffee feels like that right now. A scene in motion, a movement without a settled name. Some call it modern coffee. Others reach for Nordic roasting, or still cling to specialty. None of those quite capture it.

Maybe the name won’t come from marketing jargon at all, but from practice—from the way we consistently frame the farmer’s work with beauty, carry clarity through service, and exercise wisdom in what we highlight. Maybe the name will emerge from the scene itself, when enough of us make the value clear and durable together.

We don’t know what to call it yet. And maybe the not-knowing is the point—because this value chain is still forming. But we do know this: language matters. What we call coffee shapes how we taste it. It decides what gets valued, and what gets ignored.

Join the Conversation

Every genre needs a name, and this one doesn’t have one yet. That’s the crisis—and the opportunity.

If the Third Wave was a moment, what we’re living through now feels like a scene still tuning itself. The question is: what should we call this genre of coffee?

Drop your take. Share the names you’ve heard, the ones you wish existed, or the ones you’d never use. Let’s give language to the future of coffee—before someone else does it for us.