ICONIC CAFÉ · BERKELEY · FOUNDED 1966
Peet's Coffee: The Berkeley Shop That Quietly Started the Specialty Movement
The three guys who founded Starbucks learned everything they knew about coffee standing behind this counter.
8-bit illustration · Coffee Craft
Alfred Peet was the son of a Dutch coffee roaster. He moved to San Francisco in the 1950s, took one sip of American coffee — at the time, almost universally a bland blend of cheap Robusta, stale and over-extracted — and was personally offended.[1] On 1 April 1966, he opened a 600-square-foot store at Vine and Walnut in Berkeley and started selling something Americans had basically never tasted: fresh, dark-roasted, high-grown Arabica, bought directly through importers and roasted on a small drum roaster on site.
Why it mattered
The shop became a pilgrimage site. Customers were taught — by Peet personally, often gruffly — what a single-origin Sumatra tasted like compared to a Kenya AA, how to grind, how to brew. Among the regulars in 1970 were three friends from Seattle: Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker. They liked Peet's coffee so much they opened a store of their own in 1971 to sell the same beans (initially supplied by Peet) at Pike Place Market. They named it Starbucks.[2]
For its first decade, Starbucks was effectively a downstream Peet's. In 1984 Baldwin even bought Peet's outright. When Howard Schultz arrived and the founders eventually sold him the Starbucks name in 1987, Baldwin kept Peet's because, he said, it was the one he actually cared about.[3]
Why it tasted different
- Direct sourcing from origin — decades before "direct trade" was a marketing term.
- Dark roast on principle — Peet wanted bold, oily, low-acid cups; his "Major Dickason's Blend" is still the house style.
- Roasted-to-order in small batches — and Peet refused to sell coffee more than a few weeks old.
- The customer got educated whether they liked it or not.
What survived
The original Vine Street shop is still open. The roaster has been replaced; the recipe for Major Dickason's has not. A small handwritten plaque on the wall notes that this is the place where, in 1966, "an American specialty coffee industry was essentially invented."
A unique fact to take with you
Coffee historians sometimes call Peet's customers and apprentices "Peetniks" — and a remarkable number of the people who founded the next wave of American coffee (including the original Starbucks trio, much of the early Diedrich Coffee crew, and several pioneers of the Bay Area roasting scene) all trained, formally or informally, behind this exact counter.[4]One small Berkeley store, in other words, is the common ancestor of basically every espresso bar you have ever seen with a blackboard menu.
References
- Peet, Alfred. Alfred Peet: The Man Behind Peet's Coffee. Peet's Coffee & Tea archives.
- Schultz, Howard. Pour Your Heart Into It. Hyperion, 1997.
- Pendergrast, Mark. Uncommon Grounds. Basic Books, revised ed. 2019.
- Allen, Stewart Lee. The Devil's Cup. Soho Press, 1999.