March 2004
For Peet’s Sake
The Right Java?
by Kate Coleman
Once it was easy to be politically correct in my town of Berkeley: yell a few slogans — “Eat the Rich,” “No War,” boycott table grapes to support the perennially striking Farm Workers Union — et voila, you were a kosher lefty.
But things have changed, especially when it comes to buying the right coffee. Do you insist on Peets, the hometown favorite, a coffee outlet that dared to serve a brew so strong and complex, it obviated the need (at least for some cramming students) for other stimulants; or do you stoop to Starbucks, the upstart capitalist octopus, strangling neighborhoods out of corner grocers and cobblers as it grabs prime real estate everywhere. Should you buy only Fair Trade coffee? How ‘bout organic? And, don’t forget to mention “shade grown,” which is kind to birds and their teeming tree top habitat.
Buying a cup is now fraught with all kinds of moral implications — enough to give you a case of caffeine jitters without the caffeine. Fair Trade coffee, for example, ensures that (for the most part) Central American peasant growers who’ve banded together into cooperatives will receive a living wage, unlike the toiling coffee-picker-masses who have seen coffee prices tumble to well under a dollar a pound on the world markets. But even such cooperatively grown coffee may have been cultivated with pesticides or chemical fertilizers; although by now, TransFair USA, the international certifying body for so-called fair trade coffee, asserts that 85 percent of their product is organic. Still the organic label usually means it’s certified in the country of origin, not by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Standards may differ.
In Berkeley, true coffee aficionados have always been partial to Peets, the emporium that Mr. Alfred Peet began in the 1960s at Vine Street and Walnut, around the corner from where Chez Panisse would be born and Gourmet Ghetto flourish. Starbucks was the upstart that sold out and went global, while Peets expanded its range more modestly in Northern California. Neighborhood activists or coffee purists viewed every new Starbucks in Berkeley as an enemy stronghold.
Jim Reynolds, a patrician looking, soft-spoken coffee man has worked for Peets since the early 1980s and, today, is a veteran coffee purchaser and “cupper” (a taster for blends and the quality of single origin coffees as well). Reynolds demurs when asked to bash his Starbucks rivals. After all, he points out, ex-Peets people he’s been friends with for years went over to the dark side, but he still enjoys cordial relations, and he feels that in some ways Starbucks has gotten an unfair rap: “Starbucks, is a lot better company than many people think. Yes, they’re big, and they’re subject to criticism as the ten thousand-pound-elephant. But they’re better than the public perception of them.” Reynolds maintains that in their purchasing power Starbucks contributes to the “sustainability” of foreign coffee laborers and the land they cultivate even if “their arm had to be twisted to buy fair trade coffee.” And, Reynolds adds, even when not Fair Trade, Starbucks buys high quality coffees at a higher price. “They’re regarded as a choice buyer by many producers because they’re supportive of coffee producers.”
That said, however, Reynolds points out that Starbucks has a two-tiered system of customers and buys accordingly. “They don’t buy the crap from Vietnam, for example, but the coffee they sell to United Airlines is probably not the same quality as they sell in their stores.” He compares that quality to what he sniffs is “supermarket coffee,” grown in the lowlands with tons of chemical fertilizers, too much sun, and insecticides. “Coffee grown at higher elevations, the kind of estate coffee Peets has always purchased and supported, even if not organic, is produced under ideal conditions.”
Reynolds and Peets are not alone among roasters and coffee men in extolling beans grown in shade, often in volcanic soil that eliminates the needs for chemical anything. “There simply are very few pests and insects at the higher elevation, and the longtime growers we’ve used care about the soil and not depleting it for future generation coffee growing,” he said .
Labor practices are another matter, and there’s a move afoot to label estate grown coffees accordingly. One local roaster expressed wonder at some estates for their visionary housing, on-site health care, and free education for workers and their families, as compared with the large slave plantations in Brazil that have horrific working conditions.
One specialty coffee purveyor, who preferred not to be named, agreed with Reynolds that Starbucks’ sheer purchasing power has boosted good coffee principals abroad. But he still expressed contempt for Starbucks as a mediocre product and for Starbucks’ folksy CEO Howard Schulz as a fraudulent coffee artiste: “You know his book [Pour Your Heart into That: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time] went on and on about his great ‘passion for coffee.’ It was passion this and that and going rhapsodic over the purity of the beans. But then this Christmas, I noticed Starbucks was pushing holiday coffees in gingerbread cookie and mint flavors. How passionate was that!”
No one argues the virtues of Fair Trade coffee. Indeed, over in Oakland at a local hippie coffee café near the Grand Lake movie theater, the proud chalk scrawl on the blackboard boasts, “All of our coffee is Fair Trade and 100 percent organic!” But there’s one consideration few labor and environmental activists like to talk about much —that of taste. It proved daunting for no less a doyenne of the California food revolution than Alice Waters when she was demanding total organics for her Chez Panisse restaurant, right down to the coffee they served. Her coffee purveyor then (the mid-1980s) was Mr. Espresso, a small specialty roaster of espresso beans owned by the Di Ruocco family that had already won Waters’ patronage because they used real oak wood to fire their roasting, and they cooked the beans slowly on low flame.
But according to Carlo Di Ruocco, slow roast wasn’t enough. By the end of the decade, Waters began pressuring him to buy organic beans. After scouring the market as far as Peru and Mexico, the senior Di Ruocco told Waters that nothing was good enough. He finally found “one lady roasting organic beans” closer to home. He brought some over to Waters, and they brewed it up. Waters drank it and agreed. “It wasn’t premium coffee, and it was undrinkable,” he recalled. “Finally some came out in the late 1990s that was decent, and when Fair Trade finally arrived, Chez Panisse wanted that as well.”
Peets coffee has a Fair Trade blend and also a separate 100 percent organic blend it sells called “Gaia,” but when I complained to Reynolds that Gaia wasn’t nearly as delicious in the cup as Kenyan, he agreed. “The problem is,” he offered, “there isn’t that much organic or even Fair Trade coffee available so the growers know they can get a higher price for those beans, which lowers their motivation to be as selective in tossing out bad or mediocre beans. They have a guaranteed market, unlike the estate and plantation coffee.”
Coffee purists these days might even scoff at Peets. This Christmas they succumbed to Starbucks’ cutesy marketing and offered eggnog lattes. But the Starbucks stigma remains alive and well in the Bay Area. At Mr. Espresso’s gleaming showroom of espresso machines and coffee bar, I gratefully accepted a cappuccino as the perfect antidote to the ongoing rain and cold outside.
“Oh, I’m pretty used to the rain,” the young barista said. “I’m from Seattle.”
“Were you working in coffee up there also?”
“Yeah,” he said, pausing a moment before exclaiming hotly, “but not at Starbucks!”
A final note: Ex Berkeley Mayor Shirley Dean did the right thing back in 1999 when she issued a fiat requiring all coffee purchased by the City of Berkeley be Fair Trade stamped, the nation’s first municipality in the U.S. to do so. But in 2002 Berkeley voters soundly defeated Measure O in a 70 to 30 percent vote calling for only Fair Trade coffee to be served within Berkeley borders. Proprietors and customers alike denounced the measure as Stalinist. If only it had passed, the p.c. coffee issue might have died.
Kate Coleman’s book The Secret Wars of Judi Bari (Encounter Books) about the radical Earth First leader will be published this spring.
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