Welcome to Serious Grounds!

If you were to ask ten friends of mine to describe me, I think at least nine would interject with some mention of coffee. Those of you who think Seattle to be a coffee-obsessed town should have seen Berkeley, California in the late seventies and early eighties.

My fellow Berkeley High students and I would traipse off the then-open campus and drink cappuccinos at Trumpetvine Court or Au Coquelet, or lurk amongst the revolutionary manifestos at the Old Mole bookstore sucking down numerous cups of French Roast, exploiting the owner's sadly naive free refill policy. On the weekends we'd flock to Telegraph Avenue and order "giant caps" from Espresso Roma across the street from UC Berkeley Campus, rubbing shoulders with Iranian exchange students, architecture and engineering geeks, transplanted European supermodels, shadowy beatnik figures who might be the next American poet laureate or else some kind of dope dealer....

From there, we'd spin out to Cafe Mediterraneum (the owner of which is rumored to have invented the latte), where Jerry Rubin plotted revolution, People's Park protesters ducked out of the clouds of tear gas, and any number of aspiring rock stars wrote lyrics on napkins while drinking pint glasses of nightmarishly strong coffee.....

And then there was Peet's on Vine Street. Like Woodstock, you had to be there, but unlike Woodstock it's still standing and still doing a respectable trade. Sure, they may have passed the point of IPO. But it's still a damned good sack of beans.

History is important when talking about coffee. Legend has it that the beverage we recognize by that name was first cultivated for the purpose of brewing as kaveh by either the Yemenite or Ethiopian people some time between the twelfth and fifteenth century. Legend also has it that the American Revolution was fomented in coffeehouses. These stories may be nebulous and sketchy on the facts, but like the other cash crops that drive the world's economy, there is a mythology behind the reality that refuses to be ignored. Amber waves of grain. Corn is King. Legalize it, don't criticize it, etc.

Some of us even remember our first cup of coffee. Mine was of course Peet's, probably either House Blend or something similar, at the age of ten...which would have been 1975 or '76, in my parents' kitchen, with about 25% half and half and two spoons of sugar. I even remember one time in that same kitchen taking my first daily sip from one of our heavy stoneware mugs and feeling a grotesque scuttling on my tongue, and spitting out a brown household spider. for most sane people that would have been their last cup ever. For me, it was the beginning of a lifetime obsession.