History of Coffee

The most common legend wherein coffee was discovered is that of an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi an Abyssinian goat herder.  As the story goes Kaldi noticed his goats nibbling on bright red berries of a certain bush.  They became so energetic they didn’t want to sleep at night.  Trying some of the berries himself, he felt the same exhilaration. Kaldi brought some of these beans to a local Sufi monastery, but the Sufi monk disapproved  of their use and threw them into the fire, from which an enticing aroma billowed.  The roasted beans were quickly raked from the embers, ground up, and dissolved in hot water, yielding the first cup of coffee.

    While the Kaldi legend is the most popular there are at least three other “discovery” versions.  1; Abu Hasan, a Sufi mystic while traveling in the Ethiopian countryside noticed colourful birds picking at some unfamiliar berries.  Coffee berries actually.  2; Omar a Sufi  healer was in exile and nearly starving, discovering some berries he tried to boil them and drink the liquid.  3; A Muslim navy admiral named Zheng He from China arrived in Yemen.  In Zeng He’s encounters with Sufi Masters he shared the favorite Chinese drink-tea.  Sufis liked it for its psychoactive quality. It was perfect for night long Dikr, the  burst of energy from a refreshing drink like a gift from heaven.  But there was  a problem.  Tea only grew in China and once Zeng He’s flotilla was gone so was the tea.  However an indispensable lesson was learned; plant leaves can be used to infuse a drink with a psychoactive character which would not violate the Islamic prohibition on intoxication.

    The word coffee, the fuel of modern civilization and enabler of the Industrial Revolution, was not in the English language until 1601.  Coffee has had a quick and glorious rise to its present day status as the world’s favorite drink.  But coffee as a drink is, historically speaking relatively new.

    In the Middle East, the cradle of civilization, there was no mention of it at all in any ancient texts.  There is no archeological evidence that coffee was in  use in any form.  The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Arabs and Persians are all silent about it.

    Ibn Battuta went to Yemen in 1330 and with his characteristic eloquence described every aspect of the land.  But there was no mention of coffee, nots its plants, beans or the drink.

    Coffee first comes into the spotlight in Mecca in 1511 when Khair Bey, the Pasha o the holy city, called upon a group of Islamic scholars to decide if drinking coffee was Halal ( or not against their religion ).  The group decided that it was not.  The incident implies that coffee was already in mass use then.  So between Iba Battuta and Khair Bey we can establish when the debut of coffee occured.  And the stage of the debut was Yemen because of its proximity to Ethiopian highlands where the coffee plants were growing in the wilderness.  But except for a few local tribes who used coffee beans for ceremonial purposes, no one say any use for it.  It was the Sufis of Yemen who uncovered the psychoactive character of its bean, domesticated the plant and came up with the process of creating a drink from its bean that we know today.

    Sufism started as an ascetic movement that evolved into the mysticism of communion with God.  Over time, individual Sufi masters came into the picture and Sufi orders were established.  Psychoactive drugs also came into the picture and that theme abounds in the Persian poetries of that time in the name of wine.  Two excellent examples of Sufi poets are Hafiz and Rumi.  But wine did not have any practical value for the mainstream, and an alternative had to be found.

    Initially coffee leaves were used like the tea leaves but the caffeine content of the leaves was insignificant.  Then the coffee cherries were tried.  That tradition is still in use in today’s Yemen and it is called Qishr coffee.  Coffee cherries were better in jolts but it was soon found that the beans were even better.

    Coffee quickly became the main crop in Yemen and its coffee trading port Mocha is still a cherished name in coffee consumption.  Yemen maintained a virtual monopoly in coffee cultivation and trade for almost two hundred years.

    I wonder if the goats of the Ethiopian highlands are still dancing after eating coffee beans.

    In Sufi poetry there are countless parables where wine represents the intoxication of God which Sufism seeks in its purest and most universal form. It also implies that the Sufis like an occasional drink. I believe that this drink is not wine but coffee.  The Sufis are essentially the hippies of Islam, so, when the Sufis started using coffee in their religious ceremonies in the holy city of Mecca around 1480, it was a bit like lighting up a joint in the Vatican.

    As coffee gained popularity throughout the sixteenth century, it also gained its reputation as a troublemaking brew.  Various rulers decided that people were having too much fun in the coffeehouses.  “The patrons of the coffeehouse indulged in a variety of improper pastimes, ranging from gambling to involvement in irregular and criminally unorthodox sexual situations.

    When Khair-Beg the young govenor of Mecca, discovered that satirical verses about him were emanating from the coffeehouses, he determined that coffee must be outlawed by the Koran, and he induced his religious, legal and medical advisers to agree.  This is 1511 the  an coffeehouses were forcibly closed.  The ban though lasted only until the Cairo sultan, a habitual coffee drinker, heard about it and reversed the edict.  Other Arab rulers and religious leaders denounced coffee during the course of the 1500s.  One ruler fearing sedition during war, closed the coffeehouses.  Anyone caught drinking coffee was soundly beaten.  Second offenders were sewn into leather bags and thrown into the Bosporus.  Even so, many continued to drink coffee in secret and eventually the ban was withdrawn.

    Why did coffee drinking persist in the face of persecution in these early Arab societies?  The addictive nature of caffeine provides one answer, of course; yet there is more to it.  Coffee provided an intellectual stimulant, a pleasant way to feel increased energy without any apparent ill effects.  Coffeehouses allowed people to get together for conversation, entertainment, and business, inspiring agreements, poetry and irreverence in equal measure.  

    The Ottoman Turks occupied Yemen in 1536, and soon afterward the coffee bean became an important export throughout the Turkish Empire.  The beans generally were exported from the Yemeni port of Mocha, so the coffee from that region took on the name of the port.  The trade route involved shipping the coffee to Suez and transporting it by camel to Alexandrian warehouses, where it was picked up by French and Venetian merchants.  Because the coffee trade had become a major source of income, the Turks jealously guarded their monopoly over the trees cultivation in Yemen.  No berries were allowed to leave the country unless they first had been steeped in boiling water or partially roasted to prevent germination.

    Sometime during the 1600s a Muslim pilgrim named Baba Budan smuggled out seven seeds by taping them to his stomach and successfully cultivated them in southern India.  In 1616 the Dutch, who dominated the world’s shipping trade, managed to transport a tree to Holland from Aden.  From its offspring the Dutch began growing coffee in Ceylon in 1658.  In 1699 another Dutchman transplanted trees from Malabar to Java, followed by cultivation in Sumatra, Celebes, Timor, Bali and other islands in the East Indies.  

    During the 1700s Java and Mocha became the most famous and sought after coffees and those words are still synonymous with the black brew, though little high quality coffee currently comes from Java.

    Eventually, Europeans took to coffee with passion.  Pope Clement VIII who died in 1605, supposedly tasted the Muslim drink at the behest of his priests who wanted to ban it.  “Why,  this Satan’s drink is so delicious” he explained, “that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.  We shall fool Satan by baptizing it a truly Christian beverage”.

    In the middle of the seventeenth century Europeans were soon to discover the social as well as medicinal benefits of the Arabian drink.  By the 1650s coffee was sold on Italian streets. Venice first coffeehouse opened in 1683.  Named for the drink it served, the caffee, it quickly became synonymous with relaxed companionship, animated conversation and tasty food.

    In 1669 a new Turkish ambassador, Soliman Aga, introduced coffee at his sumptuous Parisian parties, inspiring a craze for all things Turkish.  In 1689 Francois Procope and Italian immigrant opened his Cafe de Procope.  Soon French actors, authors, dramatists and musicians were meeting there for coffee and literary conversations.  In the next century the cafe attracted notables such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and a visiting Benjamin Franklin.

    The French historian Michelet described the advent of coffee as “auspicious revolution of the times, the great event which created new customs and even modified human temperament”. Certainly coffee lessened the intake of alcohol, while the cafes provided a wonderful intellectual stew that ultimately spawned the French Revolution.  The coffee houses of continental Europe were egalitarian meeting places where men and women could without impropriety consort as they had never done before.

    Increasingly they did so over coffee that was not nearly so harsh a brew as the Turks made.  In 1710, rather than boiling coffee, the French first made it by the infusion method, with powdered coffee suspended in a cloth bag, over which boiling water was poured.  Soon they also discovered the joys of sweetened “milky coffee”.

    French writer Honore de Balzac did not trifle with such milky coffee though.  He consumed finely pulverized roasted coffee on an empty stomach with virtually no water.  The results were spectacular.  “Everything becomes agitated.  Ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground and the battle rages.  Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop. “Finally his creative juices flowing, Balzac could write.  “Forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink-for the nightly labour begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

    Coffee arrived in Vienna a bit later than in France.  In July 1683 the Turkish army, threatening to invade Europe, massed outside Vienna for a prolonged siege.  The count in charge of the Viennese troops desperately needed a messenger who could pass through the Turkish lines to reach nearby Polish troops who would come to the rescue.  Georg Franz Kolschitzky, who had lived in the Arab world for many years, took on the job, disguised in a Turkish uniform.  On September 12, om a decisive battle, the Turks were routed.

    The fleeing Turks left tents, oxen, camels, sheep, honey, rice, grain, gold and five hundred huge sacs filled with strange looking beans that the Viennese thought must be camel fodder.  Having no use for the camels they began to burn the bags.  Kolschitzky, catching a whiff of that familiar odor, intervened.  “That is coffee that you are burning! If you don’t know what coffee is give the stuff to me. I can find a good use for it. Having observed the Turkish customs, he knew the rudiments of roasting, grinding and brewing, and he soon opened the Blue Bottle, among the first Viennese cafes.  Like the Turks, he sweetened the coffee considerably, but he also strained out the grounds and added a big dollop of milk.

    Within a few decades, coffee practically fueled the intellectual life of the city.  “The city of Vienna is filled with coffee houses”, wrote a visitor early in the 1700’s, “where the novelists or those who busy themselves with newspapers delight to meet”.

    Coffee historian Ian Bersten believes that the Arab taste for black coffee, and the widespread (and eventually American ) habit of taking coffee with milk, owes something to genetics.  The Anglo-Saxon could tolerate milk, while Mediterranean peoples-Arabs, Greek, Cypriots, and southern Italians-tended to be lactose-intolerant.  That is why they continue to take their coffee straight, if sometimes well sweetened. “From the two ends of Europe there eventually developed two totally different ways to brew this new commodity-either filtered in Northern Europe or espresso style in Southern Europe.  The intolerance to milk may have caused cappuccinos to be smaller in Italy so that milk intolerance problems could be minimized”.

    Like a black torrent the coffee rage drenched England, beginning in 1650 at Oxford University, where Jacobs, a Lebanese Jew, opened the first coffeehouse for “some who delighted in noveltie”. Two years later in London, Pasque Rosee, a Greek, opened a coffeehouse and printed the first coffee advertisement, a broadside touting the “Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”.

    By 1700 there were, by some accounts, more than 2000 London coffeehouses, occupying more premises and paying more rent than any other trade.  They came to be known as penny universities, because for that price one could purchase a cup of coffee and sit for hours listening to extraordinary conversations-or, as a 1657 newspaper advertisement put it, “Publick Intercourse”.  Each coffeehouse specialized in a different type of clientele.  In one, physicians could be consulted.  Others served Protestants, Puritans, Catholics, Jews, literati, merchants, traders, fops, Whigs, Tories, army officers, actors, lawyers, clergy or wits.  The coffeehouses provided England’s first egalitarian meeting place, where a man was expected to chat with his tablemates whether he knew them or not.

    Edward Lloyd’s establishment catered primarily to seafarers and merchants, and he regularly prepared “ships lists” for underwriters who met there to offer insurance.  Thus began Lloyd’s of London, the famous insurance company.  Other coffeehouses spawned the Stock Exchange, the Banks’ Clearing House and newspapers such as the Tatler and The Spectator.

    Before the advent of coffee, the British imbibed alcohol, often in huge quantities.”What immoderate drinking in every place!” complained a British commentator in 1624.  “How they flock to the tavern!” Fifty years later another observed that “coffee-drinking hath caused a great sobriety among the nations; for whereas formerly Apprentices and Clerks with others, used to take their mornings draught in ale, beer or wine, which by the dizziness they cause in the brain, make many unfit for business, they use now to play the good-fellows in this wakeful and civil drink”.

    The strongest blast against the London coffeehouses came from women, who unlike their Continental counterparts were excluded from this all male society.  In 1674 The Women’s Petition Against Coffee complained, “We find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigour.  Never did men wear greater breeches or carry less in them of any mettle whatsoever.  This condition was all due to the excessive use of that newfangled, abominable,heathenish liquor called Coffee.

    On December 29, 1675 King Charles II issued A Proclamation for the Suppresion of Coffee Houses.  In it he banned coffeehouses as of January 10, 1676, since they had became the great resort of idle and disaffected persons, where tradesmen neglected their affairs. The worst offense, however, was that in such houses “divers false malicious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the Defamation of his Majesties Government, and to the disturbance of the peace and quiet of the realm.

    An immediate howl went up from every part of London.  Within a week, it appeared that the monarchy might once again be overthrown-and all over coffee.  On january 8, two days before the proclamation was to take effect, the king backed down.

    As loyal British subjects, the North American colonists emulated the coffee boom of the mother country, with the first American coffeehouse opening In Boston in 1689.  By the late eighteenth centure, as we have seen, tea had become the preferred British drink.  King George wanted to raise money from tea as well as other exports, however, and attempted the Stamp Act of 1765, which prompted the famous Boston Tea Party.  From that moment on, it became a patriotic American duty to avoid tea, and the coffeehouses profited as well.  Of course the pragmatic North Americans also appreciated the fact that coffee was cultivated much nearer to them than tea and was considerably cheaper.

    In 1714 the Dutch gave a healthy coffee plant to the French government, and nine years later an obsessed naval officer, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, introduced coffee cultivation to the French colony of Martinique.  After considerable court intrigue, he obtained one of the Dutch offspring plants from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and nursed it during a perilous transatlantic voyage, later referring to the “infinite care that I was obliged to bestowe upon this delicate plant”.  After avoiding capture by a corsair and surviving a tempest, de Clieu’s s ship floundered in windless doldrums for over a month.  The Frenchman protected his beloved plant from a jealous fellow passenger and shared his limited supply of water with it.  Once it finally set down roots in Martinique, the coffee tree flourished.  From that single plant, much of the world’s current coffee supply probably derives.

    Then, in 1727, a mini-drama led to the fateful introduction of coffee into Brazil.  To resolve a border dispute, the govenors of French and Dutch Guiana asked a neutral Portuguese Brazilian official named Francisco de Melo Palheta to adjudicate.  He quickly agreed, hoping that he could somehow smuggle out coffee seeds, since neither govenor would allow the seeds export.  The mediator successfully negotiated a compromise border solution and clandestinely bedded the French govenor’s wife.  At Palheta’s departure, she presented him with a bouquet of flowers-with ripe coffee berries disguised in the interior.  He planted them in his home territory of Para, from which coffee gradually spread southward.

    The American thirst for coffee was slow to develop in a young country whose rambunctious citizens preferred booze.  Many colonists considered coffee and tea poor substitutes for strong alcoholic brews.  Still coffee was popular enough to cause over a hundred angry Boston women to raid a food warehouse in 1777.  During the Revolutionary War, dealers took advantage of scarce supplies to hoard coffee beans and jack up prices.

    Throughout the first half of the 1800’s the American taste for coffee swelled, particularly after the War of 1812, which temporarily shut off access to tea just when all things French, including coffee drinking, were stylish. In the predominantly rural United States of the mid-nineteenth century, people bought green coffee beans in bulk at the local general store, then roasted and ground them at home.  Roasting the beans in a frying pan on the wood stove required twenty minutes of constant stirring and often produced uneven roasts.  For the affluent there were a variety of home roasters that turned by crank or steam, but none worked very well.  The beans were ground in a manufactured coffee mill or a mortar and pestle.

    Housewives usually brewed coffee just by boiling the grounds in water.  During the first half of the nineteenth century, there was a veritable explosion of European coffee-making patents and ingenious devices for combining hot water and ground coffee, including a popular two tier drip pot invented around the time of the French revolution by Jean Baptiste de Belloy, the Archbishop of Paris.  In 1809 a brilliant, eccentric expatriate named Benjamin Thompson modified the de Belloy pot to create his own drip version.  Rumford also made a correct brewing pronouncement:  Water for coffee should be fresh and near boiling, but coffee and water should never be boiled together, and coffee should never be reheated.  Unfortunately for American consumers, Rumford’s pot and opinions did not travel back across the Atlantic.  Nor did the numerous brewers from France and England that relied on a partial vacuum to draw hot water through ground coffee.

    During the Civil War two inventions revolutionized the nascent coffee industry, both developed to take advantage of the war economy.  The first, in 1862 was the inexpensive, lightweight and durable paper bag-an unheralded event at the time.  The second, invented in 1864 by Jabez Burns, was the self-emptying roaster.  Over the next fifteen years Burns sold hundred of his roasters as the United States, with amazing rapidity, developed into a  consumer society that relied on convenient mass produced products.  Every town of any size had its own roaster, which introduced a measure of uniformity to coffee roasting that was a sign of things to come.  Soon after a Pittsburgh grocer named John Arbuckle would revolutionize the nascent coffee industry by showing how standardization, branding and marketing could sell cheap goods.

    John Arbuckle proved to be a marketing genius.  He knew that in addition to his innovative concept of providing conveniently pre-roasted coffee, the most important selling point would be a distinctive name and label.  

    Farther north in Boston another coffee dynasty took shape.  In 1864 Caleb Chase went into business for himself as a coffee roaster with two partners.  In 1878 he joined with James Sanborn, forming Chase&Sanborn, specializing in coffee and tea.  They established a reputation for their high-grade Standard Java brand, in sealed tin cans of their own manufacture.  

    In San Francisco, James Folger started work at the Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills.  Though undoubtedly stale by the time it was brewed, the coffee proved an instant success among the miners.  In time a steam engine was introduced and the business moved to larger quarters.

    In 1899 Charles Sias took over the reins of Chase & Sanborn.  Sias loved a spectacle eventually starting coffee’s first advertising.  In 1900 he issued a booklet, After Dinner Tricks and Puzzles With Seal Brand Coffee.  The tagline was” the aristocratic coffee of America, surpassing all others in its richness and delicacy of flavor”.

    Working as a traveling salesman, a young Joel Owsley Cheek traveled in and around Tennessee and Kentucky, selling various grocery items.  Cheek roasted coffee beans one night and soon realized the cheaper brands yielded a more flavorful brew.  Experimenting with coffee samples, Cheek discovered that some origins offered superior body, others flavor and still others kick (acidity).  By mixing them he sought to find an optimal blend.  By 1892 Cheek believed he had found the perfect blend.  He approached the food buyer for the Maxwell House a prestigious Nashville hotel.  He persuaded the hotel to take twenty pounds free on a trial basis.  The blend was an instant hit. In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Maxwell House, where he had a cup of the house coffee. Asked how he liked the coffee, he replied, “Good to the last drop”.

    During World War 1 the American temperance movement had persuaded Congress that the use of grain to make alcohol was an unpatriotic waste of potential food.  Coffee consumption did climb slowly throughout the 1920s.  Prohibition had created a situation favorable to increased consumption of coffee.  Changing eating habits also helped, as light midday meals at luncheonettes and soda fountains brought requests for a sandwich and cup of coffee.  

    Owing to Prohibition, positive publicity and a public eager to socialize, coffeehouses opened throughout the twenties in major US cities.  Coffee consumption had risen to thirteen pounds, the figure hovered around ten or eleven for years, with Americans consuming half the world’s supply.  

    While coffeehouses thrived during the twenties, so did direct coffee sales to consumers, with A & P leading the way. On the west coast, in San Francisco, Hills Brothers, Folgers and MJB specialized in higher quality Columbian and Central American mild coffees.These three companies all had adopted the vacuum can.  During this time a fierce advertising war developed between all the major producers.

    The instant coffee industry grew tremendously in the postwar period.  At first Nescafe dominated sales in the United States through extensive advertising.  The United States however provided the largest potential market.  The modern consumer willingly sacrificed quality for convenience, as new instant brands proliferated.  The vending machine helped institutionalize that most venerated American tradition, the coffee break.  The phrase was the 1952 invention of the Pan American Coffee Bureau.  “Give yourself a coffee-break-and get what coffee gives to you.  The practise had begun during the war in defense plants, when time off for coffee gave workers a moment of relaxation along with a caffeine jolt.  

    High coffee prices spawned a worldwide resurgence of coffee growing.  New coffee trees  are being planted in almost every producing country in the world, observed George Gordon Paton, the editor of Coffee Annual at the end of 1950.  In Brazil a new speculative frenzy took hold.  Swindlers sold nonexistent or useless land to eager but unwary yokels, who had rush to Parana to make their fortunes growing coffee.  The destruction of Brazil’s forests continued apace in the grand old tradition of slash-burn.  Towns of 15,000 people sprang up in the areas that only a few years ago had provided homes for jaguars, tapirs, monkeys, snakes and parakeets.  The POarana lands produced up to five times more coffee per acre than the tired Sao Paulo soils.  The rich rolling plateau, well watered and 2000 feet above sea level, appeared to provide near-perfect growing conditions.  In 1950 a coffee tree produced an astonishing fourteen pounds of cherries, compared to the average one pound per tree.  By eliminating shade trees, increasing fertilizer and pesticide applications and planting coffee trees much closer this was accomplished.

    With perfection of the modern espresso machine just after World War Two, the Italian coffee bar proliferated.  In Milan in 1945, Achille Gaggia invented a spring mechanism that drove water at high pressure through finely ground roasted coffee.  The art of espresso-making then consisted of “pulling a shot” to each customer’s satisfaction.  “Its preparation, wrote an American journalist, partakes of the bravura of a tenor solo.”  Though many of the monstrous old steam-valve machines with their gargoyles and dials still graced the counters, most bars now used the modern, low-slung versions.

    The machines quickly found their way to Italian restaurants in New York and elsewhere.  By the mid-1950’s the Italian espresso craze had sparked a small coffeehouse revival, particularly in Greenwhich Village, where bohemians, poets, artists, and beatniks could sip espresso at these cafes.   A small market sprang up for home espresso and specialty and department stores offered stovetop steam-pressure machines.  

    Espresso bars took London by storm in the early fifties.  In 1952 an Italian immigrant named Pino Riservato opened the Moka Bar in a bomb-damaged laundry in Soho, renovating it with ultra-modern Formica.  On opening day and every day thereafter, the Moka Bar was mobbed, serving a thousand cups of coffee a day.  While espresso made inroads at the coffeehouses, however, it was instant coffee that found its way increasingly into the British home.  Encouraged by tea rationing, which lasted over a decade beyond the war’s end, Nestle mounted a vigorous print and billboard campaign.  Maxwell House wasn’t far behind.  The debut of English commercial television that same year had an unexpected impact.  To step a good, traditional cup of tea requires five minutes, and the commercial breaks in the TV programs weren’t that  long.  British consumers began to switch to soluble coffee, which soon accounted for over 90 percent of retail coffee sales.  

    In 1960 the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Columbia invented Juan Valdez, a friendly, mustachioed coffee grower, who with his mule, trundled his handpicked beans down from the Columbian mountains.  Five months after the campaign began there was a 300 percent increase in the number of consumers who identified Columbian coffee as the world’s finest.  

    Henry Peet set up a business roasting coffee in the Dutch village of Alkmaar in the early twentieth century.  Peet considered the coffee business a trade, not a calling.  He hoped for better things for his middle child, Alfred, but the boy disappointed him.  Suffering from an undiagnosed learning disability, young Alfred did not do well in school-but he loved the smell and taste of his father’s coffee. In 1948, eager to escape his domineering father, Alfred Peet went to Java and Sumatra, where he learned to love full-bodied arabica beans.  In 1950 Peet left for New Zealand then eventually wound up in San Francisco in 1955. One of the first things he noticed were the coffee drinking habits of Americans. “I couldn’t understand why in the richest country in the world they were drinking such poor quality coffee.”

    Peet sold his coffee with passionate authority, his female customers began to take it home and bring their husbands back the next weekend.  Peet hired two women and taught them to cup (smell, taste and evaluate) coffee.  “It takes a long time to understand the language the bean uses to talk to you,” he told them.  It would take years, he said, before they could hear that secret language.  Still, they could at least convey something of this knowledge to customers.  Swept up in the excitement of their newfound expertise, they sniffed, sipped, swooned and sold.  Within a year and a half, lines stretched around the corner.  Peet’s was hip, Peet’s was groovy.  Everyone inhaled deeply, high on the smell of the wickedly dark fresh roasted coffee.  Burlap sacks full of green beans lined the back wall.  In the middle of a sentence, Peet would announce, “I have a roast!”.  And rush over to let the rich brown beans tumble out.  At this dramatic moment, all conversation stopped.  For Peet and his customers, coffee was a religion.  Peet could be a difficult guru, however.  He would yell at customers who told him they planned to brew in a percolator.  “Why spend all this money for good coffee and then boil the hell out of it”.

    Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegel, three Seattle college students had travelled together through Europe in the late 60’s.  Back in Seattle, it seemed they were always on the search for a good cup of coffee.  In search of that, Bowker periodically drove to Vancouver, to buy beans at Murchie’s a small gourmet outlet.  On one such trip, it hit him.  Open up a coffee store in Seattle.  Around the same time, a friend offered him a cup of coffee made from beans he had ordered from Peet’s in Berkeley, and he experienced a similar revelation.  They would start a small, quality, roasting business in Seattle.  Zev Siegl went down to the Bay area to talk with Alfred Peet.  Peet agreed to supply them with his roasted coffee beans.  “Alfred was very generous , we copied his store design, with his blessing.  They took turns working at Peet’s learning the ropes.  In Seattle, they ripped apart and refurbished an old secondhand store. Nearly ready to open, they lacked a name.  All three wanted a family surname, so it would sound like it belonged to someone and “S” seemed like a good first initial.  During a brainstorming session, Gordon Bowker blurted out “Starbuck”.  The name appealed to the literary trio, since characters in Moby-Dick and The Rainmaker shared it.