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.
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Vibrant Coffee Roasters
2 weeks ago
oh, some of them do. the people who started the company i work for know a little bit. the roaster for lighthouse knows. on a good day the roasters for vita know. and those stumptown folks from down south are definitely onto something. and of course, every one of them has to some degree internalized the wisdom of good ol' alfred.
ReplyDeleteyou will notice that i do not mention our good friends at victrola. there is a reason for this, which i will elucidate upon in a future post.
Thanks for the Berkeley coffee memories, they took me back. I think my first cup of coffee was actually a bowl--a cafe au lait served to my 12-year-old self (before my parents could awake and intervene) by elderly relatives we were visiting in rural France. By high school I was a regular at Trumpetvine Court, but what I drank there was almost like one of those sweet drinks at Starbucks--more milk and sugar than coffee. When I left for college in Pittsburgh, PA, I would travel downtown to a shopping mall that had a little cafe that contained (as far as I could tell) the only espresso machine in the city. Then I returned to the Bay Area and became a die-hard Peet's drinker for many years (though there was a dalliance with Graffeo...). These days though, I'm ashamed to say I'm a little too wimpy for a cup of full strength store-brewed Peet's.
ReplyDeletei have mot much memory in general, but i too remember my first cup of coffee. i was 10 and travelling with my father in spain. we were up late in madrid on one magical night, and i had my first cafe au lait (or, i guess, con leche) with a healthy dose of sugar. heaven. i would like to go back now, now that i think of it. watching the families and kids out to eat at 11pm at night, i remember thinking, now this is how to live...
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