Specialty coffee businesses sprang up one after another in the 1990s, but the foundations for this began in the late 1960s.
At the time, commodity coffee was traded in containers, which contained burlap bags filled with coffee harvested from various growing regions.
The idea arose to see if these burlap bags could be sold individually,
or if small-lot burlap bags could be sold to small-scale roasters.
From the late 1960s, a wave of small-scale roasters began to open in the United States.
Peet's Coffee, founded in Berkeley, California in 1966,
introduced European-style dark roasts and high-quality beans, which were well-received by local students and intellectuals.
Influenced by Peett's Coffee, Starbucks Coffee was founded in Seattle in 1971, and Starbucks also began as a small-scale roaster.
Then, Erna Knutsen of B.C. Ireland, a coffee trading company in San Francisco, sold raw beans from Sumatra, Indonesia, by the burlap sack rather than by the container to small-scale roasters.
In this way, the beginnings of specialty coffee began in the late 1960s on the West Coast of the United States, when small-scale roasters advocated high-quality coffee and began to develop businesses selling small lots of beans wholesale to them.
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