Over a cappuccino at Frederix Micro Roasters in Amsterdam, Houtman told me more about this man, whose name has remained largely unfamiliar to his Dutch compatriots. Here I share highlights of our conversation, though to truly understand Peet, readers of Dutch can devour the whole book now and others should await the English translation, currently in the works.
De man die de wereld koffie leerde drinken is a spry yet rigorous account of Peet’s 87 years on earth, informed by interviews with relatives, former colleagues, customers, and students (including Starbucks founder Jerry Baldwin and Peet’s roastmaster emeritus Jim Reynolds) plus archive research in the US and the Netherlands.
“The man who taught the world to drink coffee” is the epithet given in the title of a recently published book by Jasper Houtman, an Amsterdam-based writer and an editor at Dutch newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad.
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Peet’s, the corporation, credits its own founder with having “started the craft coffee revolution.” Mark Pendergrast dedicates his book Uncommon Groundsto Peet, calling him a “coffee curmudgeon supreme.” He is the “Dutchman who taught Americans how to drink coffee,” say industry historians. And more pervasively, it lives through a company whose three founders learned from Peet everything he knew about running a coffee enterprise. It lives today in the business he began, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, a roaster and retailer with more than 200 locations across the US, and which owns a majority stake in well-known specialty roasters like Stumptown and Intelligentsia. That man, Alfred Peet, died in 2007, though his legacy is thriving. He had a penchant for roasting beans dark, the way he had experienced them in Java, Indonesia, and was unwavering in his perfectionistic Old World manner of importing, roasting, selling, and preparing coffee for an American market. Fifty years ago, a Dutchman opened a coffee shop in Berkeley, California.
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