Starbucked Page 4
Consequently, many of Peet’s early devotees were of the unshaven, patchouli-scented persuasion, a fact that sometimes bothered the stern Dutch proprietor. “Some of those guys, my god, they were unkempt!” Peet told me, a touch of shock still in his voice almost forty years later. “I’d think, ‘You better go to the Laundromat next door, and then I’ll give you some coffee.’ But the funny thing was, they understood what I was doing. It was big business they were fighting, and they appreciated that I had a good product at modest prices. So spiritually, I was one of them.” Even Peet had to laugh at this thought, coming as it did from a man who once removed his store’s stools in an effort to keep his more free-thinking patrons from hanging around. (They sat on the floor instead.) But the Dutchman’s theories on coffee roasting actually resided on a deep, far-out astral plane the hippies would have appreciated. “The coffee talks to me,” he explained. “So I ask it, ‘How do you want to be roasted?’ ”
As it turned out, the coffee wanted to be roasted darker. Because of their focus on the bottom line, the major brands chronically underroasted their product; more weight equals more profit, and shorter roasting times meant less of the beans’ mass burned off and floated out the chimney. Peet corrected this by letting his beans roast longer and lose more moisture in exchange for a bolder, fuller flavor. The result was far from an overnight success. Most patrons winced when they first tried Peet’s industrial-strength brew, but almost against their will — legs striding involuntarily toward Vine and Walnut, arms flailing cupward — their bodies demanded more. Lines slowly swelled, then twisted around the block. Loyal customers (who called themselves “Peetniks”) scoffed at those who drank inferior coffee, and they structured their lives so they’d never have to go without.
Alfred Peet wasn’t the only person in America trying to roast good beans, but he was the first to attract the kind of cultlike devotion to coffee that later boosted Starbucks, among others, to prominence. In effect, Peet made coffee a religion. “Coffee wasn’t new, but it was very much a rebirth of something old,” explained Schoenholt. “The birth of specialty coffee was much more like a cat giving birth to a litter than a mother to a child, in that there were multiple births all over the place, with lots of screaming.”
Beset by processed foods and homogeneous coffee blends, Americans craved something different, something robust and aromatic and genuine that master roasters scooped out of huge burlap sacks before their very eyes. For years, we deemed foods gourmet not if they were high in quality but if they were exotic — things like chocolate-covered butterfly wings and roasted kangaroo tails. Eating a pickled rooster comb was no doubt a fascinating culinary adventure, at least insofar as it can be fascinating to look at a bearded lady or the world’s largest petrified cow pie, yet one didn’t exactly feel compelled to repeat the experience on a regular basis. After a decades-long hiatus, food that actually tasted good started making a comeback in the 1970s at stores like New York’s Zabar’s and Dean and DeLuca. Thanks to a key technological innovation, coffee shared in this gourmet boom. In 1972, the nation first met a gentleman called Mr. Coffee, an affordable home drip coffee brewer that rendered the percolator obsolete and let consumers actually taste the differences between coffees for the first time.
All over the country, small roasters started popping up, unified by two common bonds: they all wanted better coffee, and none of them had any idea what they were doing. They were, almost without exception, idealistic white men in their thirties who had liberal arts backgrounds and a disproportionate fondness for afros; Schoenholt termed them “Berkeley dressers,” with all of the hemp clothing and Birkenstocks that phrase conjures. John Blackwell, a veteran espresso machine mechanic, explained the phenomenon to me: “We were just a bunch of old hippies trying to figure out which drug to sell, and coffee was the only legal thing we could come up with.”
They started with little in the way of coffee knowledge, but since the veteran coffee men were busy sucking up the cheapest beans they could find, no one else was going to change things. Ed Kvetko, who founded Gloria Jean’s Coffee Bean in Illinois, was a contractor. Martin Diedrich prowled around the jungles of Guatemala as an archaeologist before founding the Diedrich Coffee chain. Jim Stewart opened an ice-cream and coffee shop called the Wet Whisker — which later became Seattle’s Best Coffee — after studying to be an optometrist. “Let’s just say that when we started, this wasn’t what we had in mind,” Stewart said, referring to the enormity of the gourmet-coffee business today. “We were all so stupid, we didn’t really know what we had in mind. We just didn’t want to work for the phone company.”
A series of amateur science experiments ensued. In 1969, for instance, a Bronx-raised social worker named Paul Katzeff loaded a woodstove, a waterbed, and a few belongings into the back of a Mack truck, took a hit of acid, and let the voices guide him to Aspen, Colorado. Surrounded by hippies drinking tea made from tree bark, he decided to roast his own coffee. “All I knew was that if you heated it, it turned brown,” recalled Katzeff, who now runs Thanksgiving Coffee Company in Fort Bragg, California. “In Aspen, after I roasted my first batch of coffee for an hour, it just turned tan. It wouldn’t roast. I racked my brain to figure out why, and it was because I was up at eight thousand feet — there wasn’t enough oxygen! So I figured out a way to rig up a vacuum cleaner to provide extra air. Then, when the coffee started to snap, crackle, and pop, I thought the machine was broken and took the coffee out, but it was just a light roast.”
Perhaps the most strident recruit to the cause was George Howell, a Yale-educated art dealer who specialized in works by Mexico’s Hui-chol Indians. After sipping Peet’s every morning for six years in Berkeley, Howell moved his family to Boston in 1974 in hopes of finding more lucrative work. Instead, he became outraged at the vile Bostonian coffee. “The coffee was infernal,” he explained. “If you found any loose coffees at all, it was at old tea and spice shops in plastic bins — but they were really brown painted wooden pellets that they ground into sawdust. It was that bad.” Recognizing that improving the coffee was an “aesthetic necessity,” Howell opened the Coffee Connection in a tiny space he shared with an ice-cream vendor and a cheese shop in Harvard Square. He had just a few seats, and the ceiling overhead was a jumble of chicken wire and plywood, but for the first time customers could get fresh coffee, brewed to order in a plunger pot before their very eyes. Unlike Peet’s, the Coffee Connection was an immediate hit. “We didn’t know what to do with all of the people,” Howell told me. “We didn’t have enough coffee for everyone. We were potentially faced with bankruptcy due to overpopularity!”
But the first roaster to give coffee the kind of social cachet that would later propel Starbucks into the stratosphere was Southern California’s Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, founded in 1963 in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. Owner Herb Hyman hoped to make his business fly by drawing wealthy socialites from nearby Beverly Hills, but he did even better; he snared celebrities. If Peet’s was coffee’s cathedral, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf was its Hollywood red carpet. Johnny Carson had his own blend there. The actor Jason Robards ordered fifty pounds at a time to take with him during Broadway runs, and the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau arranged to have coffee care packages from Hyman meet him at ports around the world. Half of Hollywood had Hyman’s home phone number in case of emergency coffee shortages. The National Enquirer even once offered Hyman $5,000 to divulge what the stars drank — “But we had a big ‘fuck you’ for them,” Hyman told me.
“All of the celebrities came into our stores,” he said. “We never put pictures of them on the wall, never made a big deal out of it or took advantage of them. They just enjoyed coming in. They were marvelous people. I enjoyed all of th — well, maybe there were one or two I didn’t like. I don’t want to mention any names, but some stars weren’t as good about paying.” Among Hyman’s most scrupulous customers was Ronald Reagan, who occasionally dropped by with Nancy (a tea drinker) when he was governor of California and alway
s insisted on paying right away with a personal check. Lee Marvin — the square-jawed, gray-haired leading man who played the commander of the “Dirty Dozen” — was devoted enough to Hyman’s product that he often worked behind the counter just for fun.
The clique of coffee-mad Americans grew slowly at first, but a distant national catastrophe made it gain steam. In July 1975, Brazil endured a cold snap unlike anything seen in centuries — the so-called Black Frost, which killed over 1.5 billion coffee trees and destroyed more than half of that year’s anticipated harvest. Coffee prices immediately skyrocketed. But while this was a tragedy for Brazilian farmers, it was a boon to gourmet roasters; suddenly, their product wasn’t much more expensive than the canned stuff, enticing many dissatisfied coffee drinkers to give their beans a test brew. With even the most expensive coffees costing far less per cup than a can of soda, it was a luxury in which most could afford to indulge. “If you want a custom-made Bentley with leopard-skin seats, you’re not getting it,” Schoenholt explained. “If you want a custom-tailored shirt, it’s three hundred dollars. So what can you get? You can get a custom-roasted, custom-ground pound of coffee for four bucks.”
Bit by bit, the movement was taking shape. Stories began bouncing around about people making so much money selling bulk coffee that they had to stuff fistfuls of cash into their pockets because the till was already full. Anxious that the major brands would catch on and use their im-mense bank accounts to squash their fledgling businesses, the small roasters sought strength in numbers by founding the Specialty Coffee Association of America in 1982. (Specialty was the preferred term because the word gourmet had lost some of its prestige through misuse.) But even though members of the SCAA pooled their knowledge and financed campaigns to get Americans accustomed to better coffee, and even though the coffee giants were so busy scrapping among themselves that they ignored the SCAA entirely, none of these small roasters had the ability to vault gourmet coffee into the national consciousness. Out in the Pacific Northwest, however, a peculiar phenomenon had begun.
A Star Is Born
In the world of specialty coffee, every roaster acknowledges that he owes his livelihood to one ironclad law of human nature: once you get used to very good coffee, there’s no going back. Those who had been content with Folgers for years would suddenly retch at the mention of the canned stuff. Soon, these ordinary-seeming people — who were once responsible, well-adjusted adults — found themselves going to heroic lengths to secure top-notch beans, undeterred by petty inconveniences like, say, international border crossings or global trade restrictions.
So it was with Gordon Bowker. Once a month, Bowker would leave his home in Seattle and drive to the nearest place he could get decent coffee. This being 1970, that place was 140 miles north: a roaster called Murchie’s, in Vancouver, British Columbia. “I was a writer,” Bowker later told the Seattle Times, explaining his motive. “I had just gotten a job and I had a paycheck and I thought, now that I have money, what do I want to buy? What I wanted was, I didn’t want to drink any more bad coffee.” As his friends learned there was a bean courier in their midst, Bowker began carting ever-larger payloads of coffee back to Seattle, to the point where customs officials on the Canadian border had to give him a gentle lesson on the strict legal definition of smuggling. A brooding idea man who sometimes became so lost in thought that he’d stare right through acquaintances on the street, Bowker hit upon a solution to his coffee dilemma on one drive back and promptly shared it with his friends. They thought he was insane.
“I was driving in Gordon’s car one day and I smelled a ton of coffee,” recalled Terry Heckler, a designer who worked with Bowker. “I said, ‘Jesus, Gordon, what’s with all of this coffee?’ He said he was just up in Vancouver for his monthly run and he was getting tired of this, so he was going to import coffee himself. I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ I thought it was a joke.” Heckler paused. “I think that was the first time I really realized coffee came from beans.”
Two of Bowker’s friends thought his plan sounded like the perfect enterprise for them. Zev Siegl, the son of the Seattle Symphony’s concertmaster, had trekked through Europe with Bowker a few years before and was now searching for any profession that didn’t involve teaching history to teenagers. Jerry Baldwin, who knew Bowker from their college days at the University of San Francisco, was likewise trying to escape his cramped desk at Boeing. Baldwin and Siegl had come up with plenty of business ideas of their own — starting a classical radio station, shooting documentary films about indigenous peoples — but nothing seemed quite right until the day the three were relaxing on the lawn outside Siegl’s house on Magnolia Bluff, and Bowker uncorked his idea to open a coffee shop. “I’m willing to concede that it was Gordon’s idea,” Baldwin said with a laugh. “Zev and I just wanted to find something to do.”
The three, who fancied themselves quite the urbane young sophisticates, had a lot to learn about gourmet foodstuffs. “I remember Gordon and I having an argument once,” Baldwin recalled. “We had this roommate who was convinced that canned vegetables were better than frozen vegetables. I mean, no one thought to mention fresh ones. It wasn’t pretty back then.”
Bowker and Baldwin soon dispatched Siegl to San Francisco to do reconnaissance on the coffee roasters they’d heard whispers about. In the Bay Area, Siegl scouted shops like Capricorn Coffee, and Freed, Teller, and Freed, but the one place that made his heart thump wildly in his chest was a little storefront in Berkeley: Peet’s Coffee and Tea. After Siegl sped home with his findings, the trio agreed they had found their sage. Said Baldwin, “I thought Alfred Peet invented coffee.” Despite Peet’s severe demeanor, he was always eager to instruct genuinely curious souls in the right way — his way — of roasting and handling the bean. Once the Seattleites had genuflected properly, Peet agreed to help them in their quest by advising them and supplying them with coffee, on the condition that they each work at his Berkeley shop for a week to learn the basics — or at least how not to mangle his product. The three each invested $1,350, they borrowed $5,000 collectively from a bank, and the endeavor was on its way.
Of course, the bibliophiles still needed to settle the most important question of all: what would they name it? “Baldwin, Bowker, and Siegl” was an unappealing mouthful. All of them liked nautical imagery and the idea of high-seas adventure and importing from afar: “We wanted to have this sense of world trade, of things coming in from around the world,” Baldwin told me. They considered, accepted, then vetoed “Cargo House” and “Customs House.” Bowker was convinced that words beginning with st suggested confidence and power — think strong, strapping, stellar, stupendous — so they contemplated calling it “Steamer,” which sounded perhaps a bit too much like a bath-house. Zev and Jerry had named their hypothetical film company “Pequod,” after the ship in Moby Dick, but their friend Terry Heckler torpedoed this idea by reminding them that “there’s no way anyone’s going to drink a cup of PEE-quod.” They told Heckler that if he was such a naming genius, he should come up with something. *
“I looked at the names of ships and old maps from the Seattle area,” Heckler recalled, “and on a map of old mining camps, I saw one called ‘Starbo.’ I imagined a can of coffee at the old Starbo Mine. That really sounded like coffee to me. When I told them the name, they all looked at each other, almost simultaneously, and said, ‘Starbuck — the first mate in Moby Dick!’ ” † As corporate names go, Starbucks is outstanding. (They pluralized the name for aesthetic reasons.) It’s easy to pronounce, and the explosive k sound at the end makes it pop; this also worked for Coke, Nike, and Kinko’s. The word manages to evoke the vaguely mystical, hint at an antique tradition, and subtly remind customers what they’re there to spend. The partners were pleased.
Going along with the freewheeling spirit of the time, Heckler added to the name’s allure by designing Starbucks’s first logo around a naked woman spreading her legs. Well, technically they were fins, and you wouldn’t exactly want to call her a wo
man, since any mythology buff could tell you she was a split-tailed baubo siren — but there she was, clad only in a crown, hair cascading down her back, bare-chested and smirking as she held the tips of her two fin-legs at shoulder height. Heckler replicated the design from a fifteenth-century Norse woodcut; after removing some unsightly stomach bulging and making the image slightly less scandalous, he placed her in the middle of a chocolate-brown, cigar-band-style logo, encircled by the words Starbucks and Coffee • Tea • Spices in white. “I like the idea of the siren calling to the sailors for a cup of coffee,” Heckler explained.
Since Starbucks was still many years from becoming a corporate goliath, the fact that sirens were said to be spiritless beings who sang to lure sailors into disaster and then feed on their souls wouldn’t have given anyone pause. This was a much different company from the Starbucks of today; Baldwin, Bowker, and Siegl were in it for the adventure more than the money. “We wanted to be as far away as possible from the business world,” Baldwin said. “We never thought about branding or touching a nerve with people.” For the first Starbucks store, in the dilapidated Harbor Heights building just off Pike Place Market, they landed a bargain space for $137 a month in rent; Bowker recalls carting out enough debris to fill a dozen Dumpsters. “To give you an idea of how undercapitalized we were, I built the fixtures for our first store by hand in my parents’ basement,” said Siegl, who was the company’s only paid employee at first. With advice from Peet and copious manual labor, they scraped together a rustic storefront and opened for business on March 29, 1971.