Why did Peet's deep roast style shape US specialty coffee?
Alfred Peet, a Dutch immigrant, opened the first Peet's Coffee in Berkeley in 1966 after finding the coffee sold in the United States hard to drink. He brought the European-style deep roast approach with him, and his store gave many Americans their first taste of high-quality coffee. Among his customers were Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegel, and Gordon Bowker, who went on to found Starbucks in Seattle in 1971.
Early Starbucks sold only coffee beans, with no espresso, latte, or cappuccino on the menu, and it initially had no roasting equipment of its own. Instead it bought beans from Peet's, and Baldwin and Bowker later imitated Peet's roasting methods while developing their own style. That lineage explains why the deep roast profile associated with European coffee traditions, which arrived in America through immigrant roasters, still shapes how both brands are positioned today.
Peet's Coffee, hailed as the pioneer of specialty coffee in the United States, had its founder Alfred Peet introduce the European-style heavy roasting philosophy to America, influencing countless successors, including the three founders of Starbucks. This article will trace the historical trajectory of Peet's from its founding to its intersection with Starbucks, analyze the advantages of its heavy roasting style and the shortcomings of its in-store experience, and explore the differences in class and positioning between Peet's and Starbucks. At the end, it includes related recommendations from Front Street Coffee to provide coffee enthusiasts with more options.
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The founder of Peet's Coffee is Alfred Peet, an immigrant from the Netherlands to the United States. When he first arrived in the U.S., he found the coffee on the market to be of worrying quality and hard to drink, so in 1966 he opened the first Peet's store in Berkeley. Just how influential was this store? It can be said that it allowed many Americans to experience truly high-quality coffee for the first time. Many professionals who later entered the specialty coffee industry admitted that the reason they embarked on this path was precisely because they drank Peet's coffee and were astonished that coffee could be so delicious.
Among Peet's loyal followers were three key figures: Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegel, and Gordon Bowker. They founded Starbucks in Seattle in 1971. Yes, the birth of Starbucks was inspired by Peet's Coffee. In the early Starbucks, there were no espresso, latte, or cappuccino drinks on the menu. In fact, at that time they did not sell brewed coffee, only coffee beans. Customers only had the chance to taste a cup of coffee in the store when sampling beans. Initially, Starbucks also did not have its own roasting equipment, but ordered coffee beans from Peet's. Later, Baldwin and Bowker imitated Peet's roasting methods and gradually developed their own style.
Time came to 1984 (a rather special year, as it was both the title of a George Orwell novel and the year the Macintosh computer was introduced), when Alfred Peet decided to sell Peet's. When Starbucks' Baldwin and Bowker learned that their dream coffee shop was up for sale, they were naturally thrilled and decisively bought Peet's. Therefore, for a period of time, Starbucks and Peet's were essentially the same company. After the acquisition was completed, the two managers had to juggle both Starbucks in Seattle and Peet's in the San Francisco Bay Area, with company executives frequently traveling between the two places, exhausted by the pace. Ultimately, Baldwin and Bowker actually gave up the Starbucks they had founded themselves, selling it to Howard Schultz, who had previously served as a Starbucks supervisor. Today's Starbucks is of course partly influenced by old Starbucks, but more accurately, it was jointly built by Howard Schultz and Dave Olsen, the owner of Cafe Allegro, a pioneer of Seattle Italian-style coffee near the University of Washington—but that is another story.
Peet's Coffee belongs to the heavy roasting school. Of course, we can debate whether this roasting method is good. Their philosophy is: coffee must undergo deep roasting for many flavors to be brought out and for the mouthfeel to become complete. Personally, I actually quite agree with this view. The problem here is that heavy roasting can almost be said to push coffee's flavor to the extreme, and the line between pushing to the extreme and failure is often very thin. In other words, heavily roasted beans must be handled with extreme care during roasting, ensuring that freshness is even more critical than with light roasting, and one cannot be careless during brewing either. Peet's roasting standard is roughly stable, and in fact much better than the beans roasted by many people who spend all day criticizing how terrible Peet's is.
The problem is that they do not have sufficiently excellent staff, or rather, they lack a brewing method that can showcase the beauty of their beans.
There is no need to say much about espresso. If you order a drink like a latte, it will probably be somewhat better than Starbucks, but that is not much of an achievement to boast about. It is not easy to get a good espresso at Peet's, so let us pin our hopes on regular coffee instead. Regular coffee in the United States has always been brewed by machine, and for dark-roasted beans like Peet's, one really needs to carefully find the right water temperature, and it is best to drink it immediately after brewing. Although Peet's stores claim to discard old coffee every thirty minutes, thirty minutes is still too long. If you really want to increase the odds of getting good coffee, you might rather wait until the next fresh brew. This can increase the chance of getting good coffee, though it is not absolute. I suspect it is related to temperature, but it could also be other reasons.
Based on my own countless experiences at Peet's, about nine out of ten times you will get extremely bad coffee. What is special is that the bad coffee we usually encounter is either tasteless, or a coffee with a particularly prominent burnt flavor and nothing else. But Peet's bad coffee is mixed with many strange flavors, plus other harsh and unpleasant mouthfeels. Still, bad is bad. However, if you are lucky enough, you may get to drink a wonderful coffee unlike anything you have experienced in your life. From the first sip, as the temperature changes, each sip takes you through a different beautiful world. Naturally, buying Peet's beans and brewing them at home is also an option (if you are in the United States). Doing it yourself makes it less likely to fail, but I have not yet brewed at home that wonderful experience of getting it "just right" as I did in the Peet's store.
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
