Before they called it specialty

How the first coffee Erna Knutsen ever sold found a permanent home on our shelf.

Before specialty coffee had a name, it had a woman in San Francisco quietly building the trade that would define it. Erna Knutsen was a secretary at a coffee importer called BC Ireland. She wanted to do more, but the men at the company wouldn’t let her into the cupping room. So she found another way in: selling coffee to the small roasters the industry largely ignored, the ones who only needed a few bags at a time. The industry called them the “small trade.” Erna called them her customers.

Her first-ever purchase was a full container of Sumatra Mandheling, 300 bags of 60 kilograms each, brought to her by a college student whose family exported coffee from Sumatra. She tasted it, loved it, and sold every bag to the first three roasters she called. From there, she kept building, sourcing and selling the best coffees she could find to roasters who cared about quality. Eventually she was asked to speak at a coffee conference of large roasters (there wasn’t one for small roasters yet), and it was Erna who coined the term: specialty coffee. That name stuck, and the first coffee she ever bought and sold was Sumatra.

When Oren was starting his business, two roasters he respected both told him the same thing: call Erna Knutsen. One of them, a man whose family had been roasting since 1916, told him his own Sumatra rated a 95. Erna’s, he said, rated 100. Oren got her number from the International Coffee Organization. He picked up the phone, and Sumatra Mandheling became the first shipment of coffee Oren’s ever bought from her. He became her customer, and soon a good friend.

What’s Still on the Shelf

That was forty years ago. Sumatra Mandheling has been on our shelf without a break since.

For years, we sourced it through the same exporter Erna originally put us with. Eventually, we couldn’t anymore, and have been sourcing Sumatra through InterAmerican Coffee for the past few years. What’s stayed the same is the region and process: Aceh, in the northern Sumatran highlands around Lake Tawar, with the traditional Indonesian wet-hulled process known as giling basah that gives the cup its character. Dense, earthy, and full-bodied. We taste a lot of Sumatra before we find one that Oren accepts. He rejects about six samples for every one he keeps. That’s how the standard holds.

Also in Our House Blend

Sumatra didn’t just stay on the shelf as a single origin. Early on, customers would ask Oren for Mocha Java and French roast blended together. Real Mocha and Java were expensive and hard to find consistently. So Oren built something better: Colombia for the brightness Mocha brings, Sumatra for the body Java brings, and a darker French-roasted Colombia for the depth. He called it Oren’s Special Blend. Sumatra has been the backbone of OSB ever since.

Specialty coffee before it was labeled that way. That’s not nostalgia, just a description of how we’ve worked since the start.