Erna Knutsen worked in coffee longer than anyone I know. She retired in 2015 at 93 years of age and had worked in companies that sold coffee from the 1960s. She especially liked to tell her story of being the first woman ever to grace a cupping room. As it turned out, she was also the first woman in the USA to import green coffee – and the first to use the term ’specialty coffee’.

So it was with great excitement I was to meet Erna Knutsen in Seattle at one of the social activities at the 2014 SCAA Event. Kerry Goodman-Small from Coffee Talk had invited us to a fundraising event – an elk BBQ at Vashon Island Coffee Roasterie.

Setting out on Puget Sound, it was one of those bitterly cold evenings with a bit too much chill in the breeze for a couple of Australians. When I got to speak with Erna, she noticed how cold I was and asked where I was from. It was then she explained how she was born in the Arctic and was used to being cold. Being as kind and as charming as anyone can be, you can really understand why she got to the places she aspired to be.

Erna was born in 1921 in Bode, a tiny town in Norway above the Arctic Circle.  Her parents migrated to the USA in 1926 when Erna was 5. They settled in New York and lived in Brooklyn and Queens with Italian immigrants as neighbours. One of her most vivid childhood memories was waking up every morning to the sound and smell of her mother grinding and brewing coffee, as all the Italians in the neighbourhood did. She also remembers the smell of opening the freshly roasted packet delivered from Dallis Brothers every week. From a very early age, Erna was refining her taste for coffee.

Having left home and married at 18, her first jobs were as a shorthand typist for Wall Street bankers in New York and for lawyers in San Francisco after moving there in the 1950s. Destined to work in coffee, she took a position at the American Molasses Company as secretary for the Vice President of Coffee and later for BC Ireland as executive assistant to Bert Fulmer – both big companies that imported green bean in enormous quantities and sold it to large coffee roasters.

Unbelievable as it may sound, especially for a woman at that time, Erna made her way from secretary to president at BC Ireland in a little over 10 years. In 1985, she bought the coffee arm of the company and named it Erna Knutsen Ltd. How that happened is just as unbelievable.

Her story has been told over and over, but if you were at the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 SCAA Event, as we were, you would have had the honour of hearing bits of it from Erna herself.

Erna clearly loved telling how men back then thought the cupping room was no place for a woman. She recalled how she fooled them by buying the company, then sacked them all. The first bit was certainly true but I think the last bit was, well, Erna’s way of stretching the truth a little when she wanted to make an impact. She did this often. In the next breath, she went on to say she learnt a lot from them all. She recalled too, how when she wanted to cup coffee, it was brought to her desk; the men having roasted and brewed in the cupping room. In 1973 she eventually made it inside the cupping room, possibly the first-ever female to do so.

At this point, Erna was attracting considerable attention, and in 1974 was invited to do an interview with Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, one of only two publications that wrote about coffee back then.

While working at BC Ireland, she started to think about the way coffee was traded. There were about 4 big companies dominating the market. It was also a case of quantity over quality, with one importer reported as saying ’if it’s brown and cheap, we can sell it‘. This was the model for trading coffee back then. However, when the first wave of speciality coffee started to rumble in the 1980s, a growing number of small operators started to bob up everywhere – and they wanted quality coffee.

Once more, Erna defied the odds and found a way of getting quality coffee to small traders, another thing that was unheard of at the time.

For Erna is was a case of simple logic. If large lots could be broken up, she would be able to sell smaller lots to smaller companies. And that’s what she did. Establishing relationships with small roasters and growers, Erna was the first woman to broker and import green beans in the USA. Some of her experiences are recalled in a 3-part interview with Kevin Sinnott from Coffeecon.  It’s delightful. I hope you find is as engaging as I did …

https://www.facebook.com/CoffeeConEvent/videos/673506046552550

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=4027143944019053&ref=watch_permalink

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=588266071801461&ref=watch_permalink

One of the first containers Erna bought to execute her plan of small lots to small traders, was Sumatran Mandheling. It was sold within a month and she went on to great success trading coffee green coffee in this new way. Sumatra Mandheling has remained her favourite since. In 2011 she wrote the following in her blog …

‘For over thirty years, we have brought in the superb Sumatra coffees from the same supplier. From time to time we feature their excellent Aged Sumatra Mandheling. At this time we have a rare shipment of their Sumatra Mandheling Extra Bold. This may well be the best Asian coffee of all time. Not only is the preparation better than most any other coffee from the region, but the exceptional bean size and deep green colour hint at the depth and cleanness in the cup.  We have always been fans of the deep, syrupy smoothness of Sumatra Mandheling coffee, but this approaches the Platonic Ideal of what coffee can be. We urge you not to wait, supply is extremely limited.’

Another thing Erna did that broke through boundaries, was to visit coffee farms to speak with growers as she did with roasters. Her aim was to find good quality coffee, the kind of coffee she grew up drinking in a Norwegian family. Before that, trips to origin were to speak with brokers and bankers. No one visited a farm. Erna saw herself as a connector of people in the supply chain and in doing so, had one of the secrets to business success – of creating a large number of buyers and matching it with a large number of suppliers.

In signing a contract, Erna also did what no woman who works in importing coffee would ever do today. Being ‘back in the day’ and ‘Erna being Erna’. I suppose she got away with it. Crystal Reyes, a trader at InterAmerican is recorded as saying in the company news … ‘You knew it was her the second you picked up the phone because she was such a character … My favourite part was her red lipstick. Every time she signed a contract, she’d reapply the lipstick and give the contract a kiss—it was like her second signature. I loved seeing her contracts come across my desk. That lipstick cracked me up every time.”

Erna was on stage that evening at the 2014 SCAA Event to receive her second Lifetime Achievement Award from the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA). She was then 93, and her first was in 1991 when she was 73. She had worked tirelessly for the SCAA from its foundation years and was the first to use the term ‘Specialty Coffee’. In an SCA news story, it was said … ‘She was the first to give a name to our movement, coining the term “specialty coffee” itself, and she ceaselessly advocated for the values of quality, identity, and distinction in coffee.’

One thing I noticed that evening was the dedication of the man who helped Erna onto the stage, and Erna’s dedication to him. He was John Rapinchuk, her third husband, with whom she shared many of her successes and enjoyed the last years of her life travelling the world on cruises. He died two years before Erna, and Ted Lingle (first president of the SCAA who would have known both Erna and John from those early years), wrote a tribute in the SCA publication 25 Magazine. He described John as a very caring man and how Erna and John, who came to be known as the Knutchuks, were great fun to be with – john being very knowledgeable about food and wine and Erna about coffee.

Thanks to technology, you can watch the delightful, intelligent and witty Erna on stage accepting her award by clicking on the link below …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibxnQBaTMoU&t=551s

Erna passed away in 1918, just short of her 97th birthday. As a tribute to her contribution to specialty coffee, the then president of the SCA, Paul Stack made some very insightful and poignant statements in issue 6 of 25 Magazine …

‘Most deserved of our respect for so many reasons, Ms Knutsen coined the phrase “specialty coffee” in a 1974 publication of Tea & Coffee Trade Journal in the US. Not only the identifier of our niche in the coffee industry, her verbal capture of this new blossoming sector, along with her own work as a key entrepreneur in launching that niche, has resulted in her “specialty coffee” being the leading and bleeding edge of the multi-billion-euro global coffee industry. Remarkable as that visionary feat is, Ms Knutsen also wrangled with what can only be described as the deep misogyny of a male-dominated industry, breaking wall and ceiling to realize her vision. She is a lesson to all of us. While it is with sadness our community greets news of her passing, it is correct to celebrate her enormous contribution and role in creating said community.’