The Social Evolution of Coffee roasting: renewed attention to quality

All in all, let's look back at the social evolution of coffee roasting and then see the amazing evolution of the twentieth century.

Although pre-baked coffee beans / pre-ground coffee powder marketed by brands were very popular in industrialized European and American countries in the first half of the 20th century, the tradition of fresh baking at home persisted. In southern Europe, until the 1960s, many people still baked their daily coffee beans at home; even in the United States, some small baked cafes survived in urban neighborhoods.

After the 1960s, a wave of pursuit of convenience and standardization took off. Branded coffee beans were the main commodity in the urbanized world around the 1960s. At this time, there are not only pre-roasted coffee beans, pre-ground coffee powder, and even instant coffee powder cooked for you in advance. As far as I can remember, in the two most famous coffee producing areas in the world that I visited in the 1970s, I found that the coffee drinks served in the cafes and restaurants in these two areas were only instant coffee. At that time, most Americans and Europeans (now called pure consumers) had almost forgotten that coffee beans could be roasted at home, or even that coffee beans could be bought and ground at home. The impression of "coffee" on people at that time (even in dreams) was probably limited to the round bottles and cans, or the familiar logo patterns on the sides of the bottles and cans.

The simple process of self-baking coffee beans at home has become a lost art at this time, with only a few departmentalists in a handful of commercial bakeries, or in a few closed suburban societies where consumption is a consideration (neither because of habit nor because of tradition).

Because the price of canned coffee is not high, and can enjoy the taste of coffee, canned coffee became the most popular commodity at that time. And because at that time various manufacturers took canned coffee as the main price-cutting competitive commodity, although it had colorful and gorgeous packaging, the quality could be expected to decline very seriously. At the end of World War II, canned coffee, which used to taste rich, was very empty and stale in the 1960s.

During this period, it is said that, as the author mentioned in the first chapter, the history of coffee roasting has entered a new stage, in a coffee market full of disposable and convenient, but at the expense of quality and mainstream changes, there are a small number of small self-roasting cafes based on the United States and other industrialized countries at that time, coffee quality was gradually ignored by consumers, so they formed an organization to revive coffee quality.

This revival movement is called the Fine Coffee campaign (Specialty-Coffee Movement). So by the end of the 20th century, coffee roasting and sales changed to its original form: people bought coffee beans in bulk and ground their own coffee before brewing it. Perhaps the United States, the country that led the world to convenient consumption of coffee, will lead the world back to the less convenient but guaranteed quality of the past.