TL;DR

WE'RE CALLED THE FIFTH. WE LIKE IT.

"The Fifth came out of a lot of conversations about what we wanted this thing to be. We liked the name, but more importantly, the idea of the Fifth Wave fitted rather neatly with what we were trying to build: taking everything that’s brilliant about modern speciality coffee and making it easier for more people to discover and enjoy."

Kate & Josh - Chief Tech Folk and occasional Company Namers, The Fifth

What are the five waves of coffee?

People talk about ‘waves’ as a way of describing how our relationship with coffee has changed over time. They aren’t neat periods with agreed start and finish dates, and one wave doesn’t suddenly disappear when another arrives. Think of them more as shifts in what people expect from coffee and what the industry pays attention to.

The journey takes us from simply wanting coffee in the cupboard, through café culture and the rise of speciality coffee, to the increasingly considered world of origins, processing, brewing and precision we have today. And eventually, to the Fifth Wave.

First Wave: coffee becomes a habit

The First Wave was about making coffee widely available. Coffee moved into homes, workplaces and everyday life, usually in a form that was quick, affordable and easy to make.

Think instant coffee, supermarket tins and big pots of office coffee. Where the beans came from, how they were roasted or what particular flavours they might have weren’t really part of the conversation. The important thing was that there was coffee in the cupboard and you could have a mug of it when you wanted one. Coffee had become an everyday habit.

Second Wave: coffee becomes culture

The Second Wave took coffee out of the cupboard and made it social. Large coffee chains grew, espresso-based drinks became familiar and going out ‘for a coffee’ became an activity in its own right. Cappuccinos, lattes and flavoured syrups entered the mainstream, along with cafés designed for you to stay for rather longer than it took to finish your drink.

People also started becoming a little more curious about the coffee itself. Countries of origin began appearing on bags and menus. You might not have known much about what ‘Colombian’ meant for the coffee in your cup, but knowing where it came from was beginning to matter.

Third Wave: coffee becomes craft

The Third Wave is where things get particularly interesting for The Fifth. Coffee increasingly began to be treated more like wine. Where it was grown mattered. So did the variety of coffee, the producer, how it was processed, how it was roasted and how you brewed it.

Independent speciality roasters grew in number. Single-origin coffees became much more prominent. Traceability and sourcing received greater attention, while brewing methods such as V60 and Chemex moved from specialist cafés into people’s kitchens. Most importantly, people discovered just how different one coffee could taste from another.

If you buy coffee from an independent roaster and find yourself reading about the farm it came from, its processing method and whether you should expect blueberry, chocolate or something unexpectedly floral in the cup, you’re enjoying much of what the Third Wave brought with it.

Fourth Wave: coffee gets precise

If the Third Wave was about discovering the potential in coffee, the Fourth Wave became increasingly interested in understanding how to get that potential into the cup consistently. Things got more scientific. Water chemistry, grind distribution, temperature, brewing ratios, extraction measurements and an impressive array of equipment all became part of the conversation.

That can make the Fourth Wave sound rather intimidating, but the principle behind it is fairly simple. If a coffee can taste fantastic once, how do you understand what happened well enough to make it taste fantastic again?

Better equipment and a better understanding of brewing helped cafés and roasters become more consistent. Some of that knowledge also found its way into home brewing, which is why you can now disappear remarkably far down a rabbit hole while researching a coffee grinder. You don’t have to, incidentally.

Fifth Wave: coffee as modern business

The Fifth Wave is less about discovering another new way to brew coffee and more about bringing together what the previous waves have taught us. The quality and provenance that came with the Third Wave still matter. So does the precision of the Fourth. But the Fifth Wave asks another question: how do you take all of that care, knowledge and craft and make the whole experience work better for more people?

That means thinking beyond what happens in the cup. It includes how coffee is discovered, explained, bought and delivered. It means making quality more consistent without sanding away the character that made the coffee interesting in the first place.

For a great independent roaster or café, that might mean finding better ways to grow while maintaining the standards and personality that made people care about them. And, as it turns out, it can also mean building a platform that brings together brilliant independent roasters and makes their coffee considerably easier to discover.

Which brings us to the name.

So, why are we called The Fifth?

When we started developing the idea for The Fifth, we knew what we wanted the business to do long before we knew what to call it. We wanted to bring together independent speciality roasters from across the UK and give people a much easier way to discover the breadth of coffee they were producing. The roasters would remain the heroes, the coffee would still come directly from them, and we’d build the platform around their work to make finding, understanding and buying it simpler.

The name came out of conversations with Josh and Kate at The Glasshouse Project as we were trying to find something that captured that idea. The Fifth emerged, and it stuck. We liked the name anyway, but the more we thought about the idea of the Fifth Wave, the more appropriate it seemed.

We’re not claiming to have invented the Fifth Wave, and we’re certainly not suggesting we’re the people ushering coffee into some brave new era. Independent roasters, producers, baristas and plenty of much more knowledgeable coffee people are the ones continually pushing the industry forward. Our role is different.

We can take some of what’s brilliant about modern speciality coffee - the choice, craft, knowledge and sheer variety - and make it easier to navigate. We can bring more independent roasters together in one place, explain things without making them unnecessarily complicated, and build a better way to discover what you like. That feels very Fifth Wave to us. And, yes, we still just really like the name.

Our place in the Fifth Wave

The Fifth exists to help brilliant independent UK roasters reach more people, and to help more people discover just how good coffee at home can be. We don’t roast the coffee. We’re curating the work of people who already do that brilliantly. Our job is to build around them: better ways to discover coffee, useful information when you want to learn more, and a platform that makes exploring different roasters and different styles considerably easier.

For all the talk of waves, processes and progress, the bit we’re most interested in is fairly simple. There’s an extraordinary amount of great coffee being roasted around the UK, and we’d like to help you find yours.