Starbucked Page 3

  Among the odd effects the Turks left behind — including guns, gold, and thousands of camels — were many sacks of pale green beans, which the Austrians assumed to be camel food. The only one who recognized it as unroasted coffee was Kolschitzky. When the grateful Viennese asked the hero to name his reward, he baffled everyone by asking for the beans, later using them to open Vienna’s first café, the Blue Bottle. So goes the legend, this battle also gave coffee its most stalwart pastry companion. Seeking to remind customers of his own valiant role in the war, one Viennese baker began making rolls shaped like the crescent on the Turkish flag, and thus the croissant was born.

  This newfound taste for coffee represented an enormous improvement over what Europeans were sipping with breakfast before: beer. In fact, since their drinking water was so often contaminated, most Europeans downed beer with pretty much everything. The average Elizabethan-era Briton — children included — drank more than six pints of beer every day. Even Queen Elizabeth I knocked back a few each morning with her meat stew. But if you worry that you’ve missed out on the merriment of an ages-long frat party, ponder this recipe for a typical breakfast dish of the time:

  Beer Soup

  Heat beer in saucepan.

  Add a hunk of butter.

  Add cold beer.

  Pour mixture into a bowl of raw eggs.

  Add salt, and whisk to prevent curdling.

  Pour mixture over scraps of bread.

  Serve with beer.

  Given this continuous bender, Europeans generally lurched through their daily existence in a state of mild intoxication. Drunkenness was normal. So one can imagine the great sensation coffee ignited; this was a drink that could revolutionize your life. For the first time in history, humans could easily regulate their waking and working hours — all it took to lift oneself out of the fog of grogginess was a life-giving cup of coffee. Sleep, long a cruel and domineering mistress, fell under our control. As any modern cubicle dweller can confirm, coffee almost single-handedly made office work possible. And centuries later, the brew would fuel the industrial revolution, especially once factory managers learned that filling workers with free coffee boosted productivity. Coffee made people feel smarter, helped them do better work, and enabled them to punch in at a consistent time every morning.

  Some refused to accept this caffeinated future. “Everybody is using coffee,” grumbled Germany’s Frederick the Great in 1777. “If possible, this must be prevented. My people must drink beer.” But the resistance quickly crumbled. Strangely enough, some of coffee’s biggest early boosters were religious conservatives. Many members of the clergy clamored for widespread coffee use because they were annoyed that so many parishioners fell asleep during their sermons. The Puritans in particular campaigned for coffee as a great soberer and as a promoter of the mental effort necessary to understand the Bible’s teachings. (As a bonus, they also thought it killed the libido.)

  Horrible fates befell those who spurned coffee. Consider the following trend. What happened to Napoleon’s army once the diminutive emperor insisted that his people substitute chicory (which grew in France) for coffee (which they imported)? Defeat. During the Civil War, how did the Confederates fare after the Union blockade deprived them of their morning cup? Poorly. Nazi-occupied territories in World War II were so starved for coffee that, according to the coffee historian Mark Pendergrast, British Royal Air Force planes sometimes scattered tiny bags of it over towns to remind the locals just how awful life under Hitler was. Need we ask why the Germans really lost?

  Once the thinkers of the Enlightenment caught on to the bean’s powers, the Western world’s rich tradition of tweaking on coffee began in earnest. Artists, writers, and intellectuals came to see the drink as the key to their success, and they treated it with a corresponding level of obsession. Every day, Beethoven counted out exactly sixty beans for his ideal cup. Voltaire threw mugs of it back by the dozen, and the French novelist Honoré de Balzac reputedly drank as many as sixty cups daily — a claim that sounds absurd until one reads his acid-trip account of coffee’s effect on his mental faculties: “Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. . . . Forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink — for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water.”

  These trembling, caffeine-addled thinkers needed a place to unleash the lightning bolts darting around their minds, and they found it in the coffee-house culture of eighteenth-century London. Here, coffee-houses reached their pre-Starbucks pinnacle. In 1652, London harbored one solitary coffee-house, but by 1700, the city claimed more than two thousand of them; they grew so popular that patrons often used a favorite coffee-house as their mailing address. London’s coffee-houses were more than just places for heffed-up citizens to claw at the wallpaper and babble incoherently, however. This was important babble. The vibrant coffee-house gossip industry ultimately spawned the world’s first modern newspapers — the Tatler and the Spectator, two compendiums of the juiciest hearsay. One coffee-house birthed the first ballot box, which allowed patrons to air their views anonymously, without fear of the government spies who prowled the premises in search of traitors.

  For their frenetic intellectual activity and egalitarian atmosphere, these establishments were called “Penny Universities,” because for the price of a cup of coffee, patrons could hear the latest news, participate in debate, or witness, say, Adam Smith writing his “Wealth of Nations.” If a Londoner was in the mood for science, he could wander over to a place like the Grecian Coffee House, where Isaac Newton, the astronomer Edmond Halley, and the physician Hans Sloane once dissected a dolphin that had wandered into the Thames river. Edification came free with every purchase.

  Historians disagree about why the Brits switched so abruptly to tea, terminating the London coffee-house phenomenon, but one possible cause is this: the coffee tasted repulsive. * Since the government taxed coffee by the gallon, proprietors had to make it in advance — first roasting the beans in frying pans over a fire, which left them half scorched and half raw — and then reheat the brew later. Thus, the gastronomes of the day dubbed the beverage “syrup of soot” and “essence of old shoes” and called its flavor reminiscent of “Dog or Cats turd.” A few hundred years later, displeased Americans started making the same kinds of complaints.

  Salami Slicing

  At least every visit to a London coffee-house included an invigorating element of chance: the coffee could taste repulsive in a variety of unique and shocking ways. But postwar America faced the opposite problem. All of the coffee was the exact same kind of awful.

  By the 1950s, coffee had become a standardized product, just like spark plugs or paper clips. Over the past fifty-odd years, a diverse cornucopia of regional coffee roasters had merged into a handful of conglomerates, and the differences between their brands were slim; the only effective way to tell one coffee from another was by looking at the can it came in. Each brand used mediocre Brazilian beans, roasted them in massive batches, with consistent flavor (not quality) as the goal, and vacuum-sealed them in steel cans that were sturdy enough to withstand a tank assault — yet they couldn’t keep the coffee from going stale as it sat on shelves for months. “Coffee was terrible back then,” Jim Stewart, the founder of Seattle’s Best Coffee, told me. “It was all the same thing with different names: Folgers, Maxwell House, Hills Brothers — just disgusting. It was the fact that it was so disgusting that gave rise to the specialty-coffee business.”

  Which brings us back to a question from the beginning of this chapter: why did decent, coffee-loving Americans let their national beverage slide so far into ignominy? Odd as it may seem, they likely had no idea anything bad was happening. Consumers thought science and mass production were giving them better coffee, while in reality the major brands were methodically slicing it apart and saving themselves millions. The coffee giants had discovered that as long as Americans were boiling their
coffee to death in percolators, cuts in quality went virtually unnoticed — if they made them slowly enough. And to help carry out the systematic task of corrupting our coffee, nature gave the corporations a tool: Coffea canephora, also known as Coffea robusta, the Styrofoam peanut of the coffee world. Unlike its pleasant-tasting and expensive cousin, arabica, robusta is a high-yield, low-maintenance crop that produces coffee so bad that companies have to steam out the flavor before using it. To cut costs, the major roasters began adding robusta to their blends as filler in ever-greater amounts. The race to produce the cheapest can of coffee had begun.

  In keeping with the great American custom of total corporate honesty, the conglomerates publicly denied using robusta; yet in private, they boasted of their prowess at bilking the consumer. At one 1980s coffee industry conference in Costa Rica, the gourmet coffee pioneer George Howell listened with astonishment as a marketing agent from a major brand frankly discussed his employer’s approach. “He said the large companies were salami slicing — said it outright,” Howell recalled. “They’d cut quality five percent and nobody noticed, so they’d cut quality another five percent and still nobody noticed.”

  To be fair, the major coffee companies slaughtered their product partly at the behest of others. Supermarkets and restaurants put relentless pressure on the roasters to sell for less, because they were both using the promise of ultra-cheap coffee to lure in customers, often selling it below their own cost. Grocery stores promoted low-priced coffee as a loss leader, since they knew it was one of the few products every house-hold used daily. In diners, the bottomless five-cent cup of coffee was a nonnegotiable requirement for business; customers went into revolt if you tried to raise the price even a cent or two. But endless free refills threatened profits, prompting diner owners to dilute the product and demand the cheapest coffee possible from manufacturers. Over time, the country built up a tolerance for what amounted to acrid, coffee-flavored water, stewed from mulchlike beans and tortured for hours upon hours on hot plates.

  And that was the real coffee. After the hardships of the war, Americans thirsted for technological marvels that would fill their lives with low-cost comforts, and what could fulfill this promise better than instant coffee? Here was the truly modern way to make a cup: from tiny granules that looked like asteroids under a microscope, dense with potent “flavor crystals.” The victorious Allied troops practically lived on instant, and many of them returned to the States with a taste for it. Why would any right-minded person put up with the fuss of percolators and ground coffee when he could just heap a spoonful of patriotic minimeteors into hot water and stir?

  Well, because instant coffee was pretty revolting stuff. Most soluble coffee is produced through the “spray-dry” process, a method that would have given Samuel Prescott nightmares. In spray-drying, companies brew superconcentrated batches of coffee in vats, squeeze every last bitter particle of flavor from the grounds, and then flash-heat the liquid with air so scorching hot that the coffee immediately turns into brown dust. Next comes the most insidious step of all. Just before sealing the powdered coffee in the cans, manufacturers inject a simulated coffee aroma, so when consumers open the container, they get a whiff of fresh coffee, which, because it’s entirely fake, instantly vanishes. This being the age of Tang, when the idea of condensing real oranges into an enhanced superdrink seemed magnificent and credible, consumers vacuumed up instant coffee despite the awful taste. One contemporary review from a 1950 issue of the Consumers’ Research Bulletin even declared that instant coffee was “hot and wet and looked like coffee” but “any resemblance to coffee is purely coincidental.”

  When it came to shoppers deciding between brands, though, the stuff inside the can didn’t much matter — it was what was on the outside that counted. With all of the brands deadlocked in price and quality (or lack thereof), people bought based on which advertising campaign they liked best. As coffee became ever worse, consumers encountered a flurry of ads claiming it had never been better. Companies boasted that technological advances had made their blend more potent than that of the competition; some went so far as to claim that a pound of their coffee could make eighty or a hundred cups. And when they weren’t trumpeting Incredible New Discoveries, midcentury coffee ads played havoc with the anxieties of house-wives. In the Folgers television commercials of the 1960s, for example, husbands taunted their wives for making bad coffee: they withheld good-bye kisses, claimed the “girls at the office” made it better, and all but said the dreadful brew was destroying their lives. One TV husband is so brutalized by the coffee his wife hands him that he flings it into the garden and screams, “Oh, this coffee is criminal!” — to which his horrified wife responds, “Honey, you killed the petunias!” The only way to halt this senseless floral massacre is to rush to Papa Eddie’s grocery store or Mrs. Olsen’s kitchen and discover the marriage-healing power of “mountain-grown” Folgers.

  The ads were remarkably effective, but they wouldn’t work forever. As the quality-cutting derby thundered on, consumers — not being nearly as stupid as the coffee giants assumed — made a wise decision: they stopped drinking coffee. “So the consumer was faced with coffee that was tasting worse and worse, that was more expensive because of advertising, and plus, he had fewer choices because the smaller roasters were going out of business,” said Gillies Coffee’s Don Schoenholt, who is a sort of folk historian of the gourmet coffee movement. “We were falling into a deep pit, which people only realized in 1963. In one industry survey, which was based on 1962 data, per capita coffee consumption went down for the first time in U.S. history.”

  By the time the major roasters noticed something was amiss, it was too late. Their degraded, mass-produced beans had forced consumers to look elsewhere for a jolt. America found a replacement in soda, which offered a shot of caffeine in a liquid that, unlike bitter coffee, wasn’t an acquired taste; it was drinkable sugar. Soon, soft drinks passed coffee as the nation’s number one beverage. Rather than fight to stop the downward slide, coffee brands chose to cut more product costs and spend more on advertising, which, of course, led to more people losing patience with their morning brew. And so went the cycle.

  What we might call the dramatic climax in the story of the decline and fall of coffee took place in 1975, in a courtroom in Long Island, New York. One night that April, a traffic court judge named William Perry asked his deputy to pick up a couple of coffees from the vending truck parked outside the court-house. When the deputy returned with the provisions, Perry found the coffee so infuriatingly “putrid” that he demanded that the deputy and two plainclothes policemen bring the vendor, Thomas Zarcone, “in front of me in cuffs.” According to court records, Perry “tongue-lashed” the handcuffed Zarcone for twenty minutes in front of the officers and a court reporter; the judge “threaten[ed] him with legal action and the loss of his livelihood,” admitted the coffee cups as evidence in the pseudotrial, and forced Zarcone to apologize for the ghastly coffee. “Mister,” Perry growled before releasing him, “you’re going to be sorrier before I get through with you.” An hour later, Perry was still so angry that he had Zarcone hauled in again.

  Something had to be done about America’s coffee.

  Going Dutch

  Right around the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, help for the beleaguered coffee market began to appear. It came first in the form of Alfred Peet, the headstrong son of a Dutch coffee roaster, who had immigrated to America in 1955 in search of his fortune. Peet had reasonably assumed that in such a modern and prosperous nation, he would find others who shared his obsession with coffee quality. But when he took a job with a San Francisco coffee importer, Peet quickly grew disgusted with the morbid state of the American brew. “After a couple of years, I said to one of the tasters there, ‘Harvey, I came to one of the richest countries in the world, and they drink the lousiest coffee,’ ” Peet told me in his unusual brogue, which sounds equal parts Dutch and Scottish. Now eighty-six and still possessed of a fiery temperament that
tolerates no flattery or glad-handing, Peet takes bad coffee personally. During World War II, he watched from a Nazi labor camp as the Germans pilfered all of Holland’s decent coffee, leaving the Dutch with chicory and spoiled old beans — “just the memory of good coffee,” he said. The United States had endured no such adversity, yet the coffee was still awful. This was unacceptable.

  Peet resolved to do his part for the cause by opening a small coffee market and offering the kind of gourmet beans his father had roasted; he even imported a European-made roaster, since he considered American coffee know-how so shaky. Taking the advice of a woman he knew from his Scottish dancing club, Peet chose the counter-culture enclave of Berkeley, California, as his business’s home. On the morning of April Fool’s Day, 1966, Peet’s Coffee and Tea — a business that would one day serve as the inspiration for a vast coffee kingdom — opened its doors on the corner of Berkeley’s Vine and Walnut Streets to zero fanfare. “The only advertising I ever did came out of my chimney,” Peet said. “When I was roasting, people would come in and ask, ‘What smells so good?’ They didn’t even know coffee could taste like that. I always let the coffee speak for itself.”

  Though the store had a few stools and customers could buy sample cups of coffee, Peet’s was no coffee-house; Alfred Peet’s mission was to sell whole-bean, fresh-roasted, good coffee to the masses for at-home preparation. A notoriously difficult man, Peet berated customers who used percolators and informed any who violated his edicts that there were two kinds of coffee in the world: the kind made his way and the bad kind. Since no one else could possibly carry out his exacting standards without fail, Peet put in an endless string of fifteen-hour, micromanagement-filled work days. His daily shouting matches with his employees made many of them quit in frustration.

  In the few scattered cafés of the midsixties, such behavior would have killed many a buzz. At the time, Starbucks-style coffee-house culture — lattes, velour couches, and the like — simply didn’t exist; America’s handful of pioneering espresso bars were known not as providers of gourmet coffee, but as havens of art and rebellion. Coffee-houses like Café Wha? in Greenwich Village played host to defiant literary types and young folk luminaries, including a fresh-faced Bob Dylan. And as the beatniks merged into the hippies, coffee-houses increasingly became the haunts of scruffy hipsters who smoked pot, tried to pick up girls, and declaimed amateur poetry — often inspired by their patron saint, Allen Ginsberg, who was a constant, voluble presence at Caffe Trieste on San Francisco’s North Beach.