March 17, 2009

Gourmet coffee - a cultural change going full circle?

We take fine coffee for granted in our life. In fact, it seems that there is a coffee house in every shopping center, in your local chain grocery store, and on nearly every street corner.

We can always count on Starbucks when we are on the run and can't stop to brew our own gourmet coffee. Did you know that even with the recent cutbacks, as of early 2009 Starbucks has more than 16,000 stores in 58 countries worldwide, with nearly 11,000 located in the United States, 976 in Canada and 845 in Japan.

This all the more amazing when you consider that in the United States, the fine coffee movement really did not start until Albert Peet opened a small coffee store on Vine Street in Berkley California. He sold rich coffee made from his dark roasted cofffe beans. As he said, "Before I started, people were drinking Folgers and Hills Bros., and I thought, 'God no, there must be something better." Before Peet, the large coffee manufacturers only lightly roasted their beans...which produced bland coffee but made sure that the coffee beans (which were sold by the pound) did not lose water weight in the brewing

proceess.

Without Peet, Starbucks

might have never even started. In 1970, Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl were three Seattle college students spending  the summer in Europe. They became enthralled with dark European roasts. By chance, someone gave Baldwin a bag of Peet's coffee, and that was enough that soon Siegl was working in Peet's Berkeley store to learn the coffee trade.

When that threesome decided to open their first Starbucks coffee shop, they got their first roasted beans from Peet. He helped them find suppliers for grinders, roasters and other essential equipment. The first Starbucks store was even designed to look like Peet's shop in Berkeley, with Peet's permission.

Starbucks on every corner and worldwide

Peet's passion for fine coffee was passed on to the Starbucks founders. Then in 1982 they hired Howard Schultz who directed Starbuck's phenomenal growth curve to thousands of stores all over the world. With a passion for fine gourmet coffee, Starbucks has become integrated into our culture in avery short time.

Still, today gourmet coffee is big business. It is not the local coffee house run by  Albert Peet, or even the Starbucks championed by Howard Schultz.  Now McDonalds wants to be your local coffee house. I can get a good cup of coffee from McDonalds, and most people I talk with like McDonalds as an alternative to Starbucks or the other coffee chains.

Time for the local coffee house to rebound?

In 2001, Albert Peet worried that the new gourmet coffee industry would grow too fast. He was concerned that it would not sustain the quality that attracted millions of new coffee aficionados. "If you want to make a business big, the quality must suffer," he said.  He felt there was room for the individual proprietors who taste, buy and roast their own beans. Replaced by large corporate owners who have no choice but to buy in bulk, from many growers, in many countries.

Buying in such large quantities, Peet said, meant that coffee growers must create and use hybrid species, apply pesticides on large plantations and alter the coffee product in a quest for quantity, consistency, and safety, which inevitably effect how your coffee tastes.

Now Starbucks has come full circle, in an effort to reverse its declining sales and is introducing instant coffee. Starbucks stores have closed by the hundreds. This all raises a question, in Shultz's phrase of how to provide and enhance the "Starbuck's experience." Obviously we all love coffee, and are going to drink it somewhere, but it seems we are not buying it at the large chain coffee store as much.

Perhaps this is all a way of pointing us back to the history of gourmet coffee, back to the days when a fine cup of coffee was something that you found the best whole beans, and brewed your own coffee. Or you went to the local coffee house, where the independent proprietor proudly selected and offered coffee beans for delicious brews that he served to keep customers coming back.