Trish Rothgeb

Trish Rothgeb is an American roaster, educator and licensed coffee grader based in San Francisco. She is the founder, CEO, director of coffee and roastmaster of Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, and she works for the Coffee Quality Institute as its Quality Evaluation Specialist, the person responsible for the Q Grader programme and the educators who teach it worldwide.¹²³

She is best known outside the trade for a phrase. Rothgeb is the person usually credited with naming third wave coffee — the movement that started selling coffee as a named agricultural product rather than a hot brown drink.¹⁴ In her own telling she has been working in coffee since 1985.²

Key facts

Attribute	Detail
Based	San Francisco, California
In coffee since	1985, by her own account; began roasting around 1990 at a small in-shop roastery
Learned roasting at	Campbell Coffee Roasting Company, Campbell, California
Own company	Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters — founder, CEO, director of coffee, roastmaster
Café	one location, 2271 Union Street, San Francisco, CA 94123, plus wholesale and subscription
Second venture	Good Form Coffee, an education and consulting outfit co-founded with Dan Streetman
Institutional role	Quality Evaluation Specialist, Coffee Quality Institute
Certifications	Q Arabica Instructor; Q Robusta Grader
Known for	coining “third wave coffee”

From painting to roasting

Rothgeb was born in San Jose, California, and studied painting and drawing at San Jose State University before coffee took over. She started behind a bar as a barista, learned to roast at Campbell Coffee Roasting Company in Campbell, California, and worked about a decade in the American trade before going to Europe.⁴

Norway is the hinge in her story. Working in Oslo exposed her to a standard of quality that, in the trade’s telling and her own, reset what she thought coffee could be.²⁴ The Nordic scene of the late 1990s is the same one that produced the World Barista Championship generation and the light-roasting style that later became the third wave’s signature.

Naming the third wave

The phrase “third wave coffee” — first wave as canned supermarket commodity, second as the espresso-bar experience, third as traceable, scored, single-farm coffee — is credited to Rothgeb in an early-2000s trade article, in which she was consciously borrowing the language of the three waves of feminism.⁴ The word gave a scattered group of small roasters a name for what they thought they were doing, and it stuck hard enough that the industry still argues about the boundaries between the waves twenty years later. The full account is on Third wave coffee.

To verify — the article's year and venue are still unsettled

This wiki’s Third wave coffee note dates the essay to 2003 (following Wikipedia) and separately records a competing claim of 2002 in The Flamekeeper, the Roasters Guild newsletter. The research behind this note instead points to Roast magazine in the early 2000s.⁴⁵ No source consulted here quotes or reproduces the original article, which does not appear to be online, and the Sprudge interview retrieved for this note does not discuss the coinage at all.² What is corroborated is Rothgeb, the early 2000s and the feminism analogy — not the exact year or the publication. Note also that Timothy J. Castle published a piece titled Coffee’s Third Wave in December 1999 / January 2000, so she was not literally first to print the words.

Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters

Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters is Rothgeb’s own company: a single café at 2271 Union Street, San Francisco, with a wholesale business and a web subscription behind it.²³ Espresso-machine maker La Marzocco, a trade partner, describes her as Wrecking Ball’s founder, CEO, director of coffee and roastmaster and as “an enormously respected educator who has taught and lectured all over the world.”³

To verify — founding year and co-ownership

No source consulted states when Wrecking Ball opened. Fresh Cup, writing in November 2016, said the café was “about five years old” — which would put it around 2011 — and described her as co-running the business with her husband.⁴ The company and partner profiles read since name only Rothgeb, as founder and owner.¹³ The founding year, and whether a second owner is currently involved, are unconfirmed here.

Q grading and the Coffee Quality Institute

Rothgeb’s institutional work is with the Coffee Quality Institute, the nonprofit behind the Q Grader licence — the certification that trains people to score green coffee to a common standard. In the Sprudge Twenty interview she describes the job in her own words: “I also work for The Coffee Quality Institute as the Quality Evaluation Specialist. In that role, I focus on the Q Grader program, its content, and the educators who teach it worldwide.”² CQI uses the same title for her.⁶

She is a certified Q Arabica Instructor, and in a CQI post published 23 February 2023 she is reported to have recently earned her Q Robusta Grader certificate at SOCOF Lab in Bangkok, studying under certified Q Robusta Instructor Mbula Musau.⁶ Grading the two species is a genuinely different job — robusta is assessed against CQI’s own Fine Robusta standards rather than the Specialty Coffee Association arabica form — so a senior arabica instructor sitting the robusta exam is the programme’s cross-species argument made in person.

To verify — her current CQI title, and an older "director of Q" one

CQI’s live educator profile, fetched directly for this note, lists her simply as an “Assistant Instructor” in the United States, with badges for Q Arabica, Q Processor and Q Robusta — it does not show “Quality Evaluation Specialist” or “Q Arabica Instructor” in the text retrieved.⁷ The research report behind this note read the same page as saying “CEO and owner of WreckingBallCoffee.com” and “Co-founder at Good Form Coffee Educators”, which the fetch did not return either — so the profile has either changed or renders differently to different readers. Separately, Fresh Cup in 2016 called her “director of Q and educational programs” at CQI, a title CQI does not currently use; that is most likely a former role, but no dated record of her CQI tenure was found.⁴ The Q Processor credential shown on the profile is not mentioned in any other source read here.

Good Form Coffee

With Dan Streetman — of Bird and Bear Coffee — Rothgeb co-founded Good Form Coffee, a San Francisco education and consulting venture aimed at the training side of the industry.²³

To verify — 2023 or 2024

Rothgeb’s own Sprudge interview gives the founding as 2023; La Marzocco’s write-up says she launched Good Form “in early 2024”.²³ The two are close enough to be an announcement lagging a decision, but no source read here states a date, and the venture’s legal form is nowhere described.

Credentials and firsts

Fresh Cup Magazine reports that Rothgeb was the first female Q grader in the United States and the seventh Q grader in the US overall, and a founding member of the Barista Guild of America, the SCAA’s barista wing.⁴

To verify — the "firsts" rest on one trade magazine

Both claims come from a single secondary source, Fresh Cup.⁴ CQI’s own pages confirm her instructor status but say nothing about her being the first female Q grader, and no SCA or Barista Guild founding document was consulted.⁶⁷ The claims are widely repeated in the trade and are plausible, but they are not corroborated against a primary record here.

What isn’t recorded

Rothgeb is a roaster, grader and educator, not a producer, and that shapes what evidence exists. No auction result, lot number, hammer price, cupping score, farm altitude, variety or processing detail is tied to her by name in any source consulted for this note. She does not appear in Cup of Excellence or Best of Panama results as a producer, and Wrecking Ball’s specific buying relationships are not documented in the material read here. A roastery of its size almost certainly buys from named farms, but naming any of them would be guesswork.

Related

• Third wave coffee — the movement she named, and the disputed dating of the article that named it
• Coffee Quality Institute · Q Grader · Fine Robusta — the certification programme she runs and the robusta standard she trained into
• Specialty Coffee Association · Cupping · Coffee scoring — the grading machinery Q licences plug into
• Erna Knutsen — who named “specialty coffee” a generation before Rothgeb named the third wave
• Coffee roasting · Specialty coffee — the craft and the tier she works in
• Heather Perry · George Howell — American contemporaries in competition and retail specialty

Official links

• Official site — Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters
• Educator profile — Coffee Quality Institute

Footnotes

1. Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters — About Us — the company’s own profile page; returned HTTP 429 on repeated fetch attempts from this machine and is cited via the research report only, for her founder/CEO/director of coffee/roastmaster titles ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Sprudge — Trish Rothgeb: The Sprudge Twenty Interview — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Quality Evaluation Specialist quote, “in coffee since 1985”, roasting from 1990, Oslo, and Good Form Coffee (2023, with Dan Streetman of Bird and Bear Coffee, San Francisco) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. La Marzocco USA — Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, San Francisco — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2271 Union Street address, the founder/CEO/director of coffee/roastmaster description, the “enormously respected educator” quote, and the “early 2024” Good Form launch date ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. Fresh Cup Magazine — Do You Know Trish Rothgeb? — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the San Jose birth, San Jose State painting studies, Campbell Coffee Roasting Company, the Norway paradigm shift, “first female Q grader in the US” and “seventh Q grader in the US”, the Barista Guild of America founding-member claim, the “director of Q and educational programs” title, the third-wave credit, and the 2016 “about five years old” café detail ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

5. Third-wave coffee — Wikipedia — the source behind this wiki’s existing 2003 dating and the Timothy J. Castle 1999/2000 article, confirmed via WebFetch for Third wave coffee ↩

6. CQI — Trish Rothgeb talks about cross-species certification at CQI — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Quality Evaluation Specialist title, the certified Q Arabica Instructor status, the Q Robusta Grader certificate at SOCOF Lab in Bangkok under Mbula Musau, and the 23 February 2023 publication date ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. CQI — Trish Rothgeb, United States (educator profile) — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the “Assistant Instructor” listing and the Q Arabica / Q Processor / Q Robusta credential badges ↩ ↩²