Alfred Peet



Peets Coffee in Portland

An immigrant from the Netherlands, Alfred Peet began roasting coffee in California in the sixties.  His first coffee shop is still open in North Berkley near the University of California. He became friends with the three founders of Starbucks and they bought their first beans from Peet in the early seventies.  Alfred Peet died in 2007 at the age of 87.  Jerry Baldwin one of the three original owners of Starbucks bought Peets in 1984 after selling Starbucks to Howard Schultz, Starbucks present owner.

So the following morning, after the ambush, I thought I’d get another cup of coffee from Peets.  “Do you have a light roast?”  I knew part of the ambush was the incredible dark burnt roast the previous morning.  “Sorry, all of our coffees are on the dark side”, he replied. I added my portion of half and half, sat down and took the first sip.  We all need a second chance don’t we?  Satisfied we packed up and left Portland for Lincoln City on the Oregon coast.  I will visit Peets again.

We give Starbucks too much credit for bringing Italy to North America.  It really was Alfred Peet.  Thanks Al!

SCAA Portland and Coffee

Coffee event of the year was hosted in Portland, Oregon - a city passionate about everything.  Boundaries here are hard to find.  Entrepreneurs run wild, opening businesses where only weeds grow.  The only prerequisite to start a business here is that you have three credit cards.  Portland has an abundance of roasters, micro brewers and distillers, all making it work in a unique community.

Forty countries were represented, ten thousand people attended.  Seminars ranged from creating star baristas to the sustainability of the coffee farms around the world.  Every inch of the massive show floor was buzzing with everything to do with coffee; large roaster machines, countries showing their coffee, to cash registers and funky food.  A coffee aficionado’s paradise.

The first morning we walked into the popular Peets Coffehouse, confident, knowing the coffee will be good.   The first sip entered my mouth like an ambush.  By the time my eyeballs adjusted, it was over.  Nothing left.  No lingering warm after taste of a nutty or floral sweetness.  No, gone!  Overwhelming disappointment.  I hate that.

So the next try was at Public Domain.  Sort of like going into a corporate office.  Menu only had coffee.  Wow, these guys are serious.  “Americano with room, please.”  Did I say, “with room”?  Quickly I scanned the room for a condiment table; whew, they did have sugar and milk.  A pretentious place, no doubt, yet I appreciated their adventurous approach to coffee. Pushing the boundaries.  O right, this Is Portland.

I love coffee!

More memories of coffee...



Here are a couple more entries for our coffee memories contest, shared by patrons:

Back in the early nineties in Sydney, Nova Scotia, there was not a lot to do after 10:00 at night. You could hang out at a friend's, go to the show, drive around, or go for coffee. After shooting the drag for an hour or so, we would inevitably end up at Jasper's--the only 24 hour restaurant in town. We'd slide into the padded vinyl seats of a big booth, order appetizers, maybe dessert, and the coffee was bottomless. Sarah was liberal with the sugar: white streams of it in each refill. The waitresses were quick to spot an emptying cup, materializing with the round glass pot to replenish the black steaming brew: "Can I top you up, dear?" At the end of our night we'd have gone through at least a full pot, half the sugar, a shift of waitresses, and several rounds of truckers, taxi drivers, and recent bar patrons looking to sober up enough to get home It all made for good entertainment.

Jasper's is closed and gone now. There's nowhere quite the same to loiter over coffee into the wee hours of tomorrow, but I can always get together with friends and remember the good times, chatting over a cup of coffee or five.

-Submitted by Margaret Mattheis

Here's another from Anna Gladue, from our own town of Hope:

This goes back over 30 years. I couldn't have been more than four or five years old. It was always so much fun to stay at my Buby and Zaida's house (my grandparents), I got to have dinner in front of the television, breakfast in bed, treats, outing, name it! But the best part was coffee with breakfast.

They would put one or two tablespoons of their brewed coffee into a coffee cup (HAD to be a coffee cup) and fill it with milk. Must be why I drink two pots a day now. :)

Thanks for sharing folks! We will be announcing our winners soon! Makes me curious about what the nostalgic coffee-related memories will be of today's generation of young people...

Everyone's got a story...

My earliest memories of coffee go back much further than when I decided to start drinking it myself. Coffee, more accurately coffee time,was a part of daily life since as far back as I can remember. Coffee was the thing I had to wait for my parents to finish before they could attend to my pressing needs--a ride to the local pool, or help navigating MS DOS to play computer games. There were always endless cups of coffee to be finished. Now that I'm older I appreciate that my parents have made a habit of sitting down together to pause the frenzy of daily life, to enjoy the simple pleasures of conversation and coffee (and usually cookies).

If you haven't heard yet, we are currently hosting a little contest at the Blue Moose in an effort to collect some stories about early memories of coffee. We're trying to capture the experience of coffee, reaching back to the time before there was a Starbucks on every corner. The coffee itself may not have been anything special, but that's not really what this is about.

To get you thinking about your own stories, here's our first entry, sent to us from Drew:
 

It was the summer of 1990. I was 18, my brother was 20, and he had a 1979 Honda Civic. We drove to the Rockies to climb mountains and quickly ran out of money. We had to get back to Vancouver as quickly as possible to conserve funds. On the way home we came through the Okanagan on a beautiful August evening. We had scrambled to the true summit of Mt Norquay above Banff that morning and were dead tired. We stopped at an A&W in Kelowna for dinner and with our burgers had giant cups of coffee – a first for me as I had never drunk it beyond a sip before. Black, crappy coffee served up almost boiling hot from a glass carafe. Heading out of Kelowna as the sun set we were listening to old 1930’s radio serial dramas on the car AM radio until the station faded somewhere on the Connector. We came into Hope around midnight and everything was closed. The caffeine buzz faded out west of Hope along the 1 and we ended up sleeping for two hours,  our seats tilted back as far as they would go, with the car pulled off on a dead-end side road near Herrling Island. Next morning the next coffees went down easier in Chilliwack and we made it home by 8 AM, ahead of the morning rush hour and me with $2.69 in mixed change left in my wallet.

Nothing so memorable as that first cup of scalding, crappy coffee. Thanks Drew! If you want to enter our contest (you could win a $50 Blue Moose giftcard!) send your entries of 250-ish words to Wes at info@bluemoosecafe.com.