Immigrant of the Day: Alfred Peet (Netherlands)

Known as the “grandfather of specialty coffee,” Alfred Peet, a Dutch immigrant who grew a coffee empire in California starting with a first tiny shop, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, in Berkeley, died last week at 87.  (For his obituary in the L.A. Times, click here.). Peet learned the coffee trade by helping his father in the family’s small coffee roasting business in his hometown of Alkmaar, Holland.

After World War II, Alfred Peet moved to London, where he joined Lipton tea and apprenticed in the tea business. He worked in that industry in Indonesia, then still a Dutch colony, and moved to San Francisco in 1955. “I came to the richest country in the world, so why are they drinking the lousiest coffee?” Peet asked himself soon after he arrived in California.

Alfred Peet opened his first Peet’s store in 1966 – with a roasting machine on the premises – a few blocks from the UC Berkeley campus. Peet’s roasted coffee in the distinctive style he learned from his family. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Peet’s Coffee & Tea was a pioneer in Berkeley’s “gourmet ghetto.”  For more on the history of Peet’s, click here.

Peet’s reportedly was the inspiration for now-rival Starbucks. The three founders of Starbucks knew Alfred Peet personally, founded Starbucks in Seattle, Washington and bought the coffee beans for Starbucks directly from Peet’s during their first year of business in 1971.

KJ