Bloggle

Corby Kummer — author of The Joy of Coffee — offers a tribute to the late, great Alfred Peet this week. While most folks who’ve written about Mr. Peet have focused on the Peet’s / Starbucks relationship and the West Coast roast style, Corby groks that Al’s work and influence reached far beyond the roaster. (I think so, too.)

Peet brought a new kind of connoisseurship to a place that was ready to embrace it: the radicalized community of Berkeley, where rejecting stale, conformist coffee could be viewed on a continuum with rejecting stale, conformist war policies. Alice Waters may be rightly credited with launching the American food revolution, and with it the buy-local movement, from her restaurant Chez Panisse, which opened in 1971 around the corner from the original Peet’s. But Waters herself credits Peet with making her and her customers take a hard look at who grew and made what they were eating and drinking — including wine.

Corby takes a wobbling turn in suggesting that the art of a lighter-roasted coffee is lost — which is a silly thought, and completely unfounded — but I appreciate his sentiment in the end…

That one man’s preferences could shape international taste is extraordinary. Peet’s legacy persists in the hundreds of personalized drinks people order from Starbucks baristas every second everywhere in the known world, and on the blogs like sweetmarias.com that unite coffee fanatics in many countries. Anyone who considers his or her own taste in coffee to be the only right taste is making Alfred Peet, somewhere, smile.

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• Say what you will about the Grey Lady’s reporting, they still do a great obit, and their remembrance of Alfred Peet is warm and packed with fondness. More still, at The Daily Californian, and The Seattle Post Intelligencer.
• A little late to the party? The big news this week is that Starbucks has entered the fray of single-cup coffee merchants. First question, what took them so long? Second question, why choose Tassimo, a single-cup machine that’s a… what’s the word? Oh yeah… loser.
  

  Kraft launched Tassimo in France in 2004 and later extended the business to the United States, Canada and other countries.

  But the business failed to live up to initial expectations and in January Kraft decided to take a $245 million asset-impairment charge related to the business, largely due to lower manufacturing capacity utilization.

  Big picture: Starbucks’ entry to the market can only help sell *everybody’s* brewers as they’ll bring more awareness to single-cup at home than any ten other roasters combined. Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the first comment found at Gizmodo’s entry on the news. ;)

• Finally — and this one is worth it just for the photoshopped to-go cup — word on Starbucks entry into Russia.
  

  
  “[W]hile Russians have taken quickly to coffee, drinking patterns here differ from the West. Many coffee shops stay open round the clock, and people like to while away an hour or two slowly drinking and smoking. Coffee House, with 90 shops in Moscow, doesn’t just serve coffee, but beer and vodka too.

  Starbucks spokesperson Kerry Irwin confirmed that except for some ‘local content’ in the food offered, the company would not be changing anything about its global model to cater to local taste.”

  How do you spell glasnost, again?

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Alfred Peet — founder of Peet’s Coffee, grandfather of specialty coffee in the U.S. — died this week.

Mr. Peet opened his coffee shop at the corner of Walnut and Vine in Berkeley, California in 1966, and awakened the American palate to the high-grown, high quality coffees of Costa Rica, Guatemala and East Africa… coffees that his father had roasted in the Netherlands prior to World War II. More, he helped to establish a uniquely American coffee house culture. Walnut and Vine became a gathering place; a hang-out for musicians and artists, writers and radicals.

Alfred was an inspiration to most everybody in the specialty coffee trade. He famously schooled Starbucks’ founders Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl on the fundamentals of coffee roasting when they were purchasing more coffee for their Seattle store than Peet could roast, himself. His signature deep coffee roast — pungent, smoky, but still distinctive of its origin — became the hallmark of “West-coast” styled roasting.

Alfred Peet always wanted his coffee to tell his story. For forty years it’s done just that.

Thanks, Al.

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