In 1969 Ueshima Coffee Company introduced the first ready-to-serve canned coffee to Japan. Five years later Coca-Cola introduced Georgia Coffee, a canned sweetened coffee drink, with a commercial spoof on Gone With the Wind in which the Rhett Butler character chose the drink over Scarlett O’Hara. The canned beverages, dispensed hot or cold from vending machines, established a popular new coffee category in Japan. By 1975 the Japanese were consuming 20 million cases a year, and total Japanese coffee sales swelled to more than $100 million annually.
In Europe instant coffee sales grew to 18 percent of the market, though its popularity varied by country. Between them Britain and West Germany consumed two-thirds of Europe’s instant coffee. The Scandinavians preferred higher quality regular coffee, while the Italians stuck with espresso and Neapolitan stovetop brewers. In France an instant-chicory mixture was popular, while this mix represented half of coffee consumption in Switzerland, home to Nestlé, the world’s largest soluble manufacturer.
The large European roasters—Douwe Egberts, Jacobs, Eduscho, Tchibo, Lavazza, and Gevalia (purchased by General Foods in 1970)—expanded as the continent became more industrialized and urbanized, while smaller roasters failed. Both Tchibo and Eduscho opened thousands of small retail outlets, where they sold whole arabica blends along with gift items. Completely recovered from World War II, the European coffee industry reached a plateau in the 1970s, as per-capita growth stagnated. Since 1950, however, the consumption patterns of America and Europe had reversed. By the 1970s Europe consumed approximately half of the world’s coffee, with the United States taking less than 40 percent.
The King of the Robustas and the Burundi Massacres
In the early 1970s many coffee-growing African nations were still suffering from postindependence tribal friction and political corruption. In Zaire, under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, coffee was sold through a centralized coffee board from which Mobutu and his cronies took most of the profits. In 1970 Claude Saks, a New York green coffee importer, visited the country. The Kinshasa bureaucrats conveyed a “hate-the-white-man” attitude, and Saks was nearly shot by a soldier, but he smelled cash. “Whenever there is chaos and disorganization,” Saks observed, “that is the time to make money.” With his father, founder of G. M. Saks Inc., he pushed the firm to become “king of the robustas, the low grades.”
The younger Saks chafed under the conservatism of his father and broke from him in 1972 to start Saks International with a partner, later merging with Multitrade, a Dutch commodities house. “The coffee trade people knew manners, wines, art, music, and politics,” he noted. “They behaved as refined gentlemen, yet would not hesitate to cut your gizzard out or squeeze your balls if they could get the slightest advantage.”
In fall 1972 Claude Saks flew into Burundi, where the minority Tutsi ruled the Hutu majority. In April of that year, young Hutu intellectuals led an insurrection in which a small number of Tutsi were killed. In reprisal, the Tutsi engaged in a virtual Hutu genocide, lasting for four months. Saks learned that the government planned to nationalize all exporters, so he met with the minister of agriculture, a Tutsi, and cemented the relationship with an envelope stuffed with local currency. “I considered this practice no different than giving a tip to a maître d’ to obtain a good table,” he observed.
Over 100,000 Hutus were slaughtered in 1972, with some estimates ranging as high as 250,000. Other African states failed to intervene, since they had their own tribal tensions to worry about. Nor did the United Nations act, hesitant to interfere in a black-ruled country. The U.S. State Department did nothing, other than to suspend cultural exchanges.
The most effective action the United States could have taken would have been to boycott Burundi’s coffee, since American importers bought 80 percent of the country’s exported beans, on which the economy relied. The State Department’s Herman Cohen told a congressional committee in 1973—when killings began anew—that a coffee boycott had been considered, but that it would have punished both Hutus and Tutsis, preventing them from purchasing bread, medicine, clothing, and other necessities. “In short, a coffee boycott would have been an inhuman response.”
Roger Morris, who represented the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, vehemently disagreed. “Most of the ruling trade goes to the Tutsi,” Morris said. “It is a main underpinning of the regime financially. About one-seventh get through to the Hutu family farmers.” Because the United States had no strategic interest in Burundi and could easily do without its coffee, the situation provided the perfect opportunity, Morris asserted, “for the United States to exercise its international morality, idealism, and commitment to human rights—that is what makes the case so tragic.”
Just before Thanksgiving in 1973, Claude Saks lunched at the fancy St. Regis Hotel in New York City with the chairman and vice chairman of the Burundi National Bank. “As you know,” the well-dressed Tutsi chairman began over drinks, “there have been certain disturbances in our country.” Christ, Saks thought, 100,000 dead and 100,000 fled, and he calls it “disturbances.” The banker explained that Hutu laborers had departed before picking all of the coffee, but the bank still held some 160,000 bags. Saks purchased 100,000 of them.
Starbucks: The Romantic Period
While wheeler-dealers like Claude Saks made their fortunes and General Foods, Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, and Jacobs fought for world supremacy in mass-marketed canned coffee, a renewed quest for quality was spear-headed by disaffected baby boomers. Many of them had hitchhiked through Europe or had been stationed there while serving in the military, and they had discovered the joys of espresso, specialty coffee shops, and the café. With heightened international tastes, they were also searching for community, for grassroots verities. They found them in aromatic fresh-roasted whole beans, tumbling from small roasters. Many had been directly inspired by a pilgrimage to Berkeley to inhale the atmosphere at Peet’s.
Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegl, three Seattle college students, had traveled through Europe together. By 1970, now in their late twenties, they all landed back in Seattle. Bowker wrote for a regional magazine and started an advertising company. Baldwin and Siegl were teachers.
In search of good coffee, Bowker periodically drove to Vancouver, British Columbia, to buy beans at Murchie’s, a small gourmet outlet. On one such 1970 trip, “it hit me. Open a coffee store in Seattle!” Around the same time, a friend offered Baldwin a cup of coffee made from beans he had ordered from Peet’s in Berkeley, and he experienced a similar revelation. They would start a small, quality roasting business in Seattle.
Zev Siegl went down to the Bay Area to talk with Alfred Peet and other roasters such as Jim Hardcastle and Graffeo and Freed, Teller & Freed. Peet agreed to supply them with his roasted coffee beans. “Alfred was very generous,” Baldwin remembered. “We copied his store design, with his blessing.” Over Christmas they took turns working in Berkeley at Peet’s, learning the ropes. In Seattle, they ripped apart and refurbished an old secondhand store on Western Avenue where the rent was $137 a month. Baldwin took an accounting course. Each of the friends put up $1,500 and borrowed $5,000 from a bank. With Peet’s help, they found suppliers for coffee grinders, brewers, other accessories, and bulk teas.
Nearly ready to open, they lacked a name. “Bowker, Siegl, & Baldwin sounded too much like a law firm,” Baldwin said, “but we wanted a family surname, so it would sound like it belonged to someone, and ‘S’ seemed like a good first initial. We came up with a bunch of names, including Steamers and Starbo. From Starbo, Gordon blurted out ‘Starbuck.’” The name appealed to the literary trio, since characters in Moby-Dick and The Rainmaker shared it. Besides, Starbucks had a strong ring to it. All the letters rested above the line, with tall letters framing either end.
With a bare-breasted, twin-tailed mermaid as a logo, Starbucks opened on March 30, 1971, and was an immediate hit, selling primarily whole beans and supplies. In the first nine months, the store grossed $49,000—not enough to live on,
but encouraging. The partners opened another store the following year, and Alfred Peet told them they needed to buy their own roaster. “You’re getting too big.”
They added a third store in 1973. “I was happy,” Baldwin reminisced. “I had employees making more money than I did, but it was an adventure. In retrospect, I would call this the Romantic Period, when so many young people caught the coffee bug.”
God’s Gift to Coffee
In 1969 thirty-one-year-old former social worker Paul Katzeff dropped a tab of acid and then decided to move. “I realized I had to get out of New York City to find my spot, like Carlos Castaneda wrote in The Teachings of Don Juan.” Katzeff bought an old Mack truck, put a wood-burning stove and waterbed in the back, and headed west. He wound up in Aspen, Colorado, where he decided to open the resort town’s first coffeehouse.
In the Thanksgiving Cafe, he served coffee in little individual Melitta drip pots. “Customers could see it brewed before their eyes.” He soon supplied three grocery stores with packaged beans from what he named the Thanksgiving Coffee Company. The coffeehouse was a hit, but he could never turn a profit. “I gave my hippy friends jobs, and it turns out they were stealing from me.”
In 1972 Katzeff cleared out, throwing his roaster and grinder on the back of the Mack truck and heading west to California, where he eventually wholesaled his beans to local bed-and-breakfasts, hotels, and businesses. In 1975 he convinced a few local supermarkets to sell bulk Thanksgiving Coffee. Over time Katzeff developed a mail-order business as well. “I had no baggage, no preconceived notions,” Katzeff recalled. “When I came to coffee, the business consisted of a bunch of old people without much creativity. I was perhaps God’s gift to coffee.”
A Coffee Love Affair
Erna Knutsen, who had arrived in New York City from Norway when she was five years old, took awhile to find her calling in life, working her way through three husbands and across the continent to California.
In 1968, already in her early forties, Knutsen (going by her married name, Erna Guerrieri) took a job as a private secretary to Bert Fullmer at B. C. Ireland, a long-established San Francisco coffee and spice importer. In the early 1970s, with her boss’s encouragement, Knutsen developed a little niche for herself, selling broken lots (less than a container of coffee, which holds 250 bags) of higher quality arabica beans to the “small trade,” tiny roasting outfits that were beginning to pop up along the California coast. Eager to develop her palate, she told her boss that she wanted to learn the arcane art of cupping. If she really wanted to serve her clients, she needed to be able to speak from direct personal experience about the acidity, body, aroma, and flavor of a particular sample of beans. The men at B. C. Ireland objected. “If that cunt comes in here, we’re quitting,” Knutsen overheard one of them say.
Yet she persisted, and in 1973 she finally got into the cupping room. “They laughed at me and told me I didn’t cup properly. I was too dainty at first.” In time, however, she learned to slurp the coffee samples explosively, mixing the spray with oxygen in flavor blasts to her taste buds. “I have a very good palate and sense memory.” She had commenced “the greatest love affair of my life,” what she termed her “grand passion” for coffee.
Her enthusiastic expertise charmed roasters and earned her a reputation throughout the country as the doyenne of better beans, or “green jewels,” as she called them. Knutsen developed exclusive relationships with buyers in Africa, Hawaii, Central America, Jamaica. At a time when most U.S. green importers were pinching every penny in the low-quality price wars, Knutsen paid what seemed like exorbitant prices for the best beans that had been going only to Europe and Japan. In turn, her grateful customers willingly purchased them.
In 1974 the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal featured an interview with Knutsen in which she coined the term specialty coffees to refer to the Celebes Kalossi, Ethiopian Yrgacheffe, and Yemen Mocha she sold. This term would come to define the nascent gourmet coffee movement. Knutsen predicted a bright future for specialty coffee. “There is an emerging group, largely young people . . . who value good coffee, and I am certain that our end of the business will grow.” Like those interested in fine wines, the coffee connoisseur would seek “those modest luxuries that most can still afford.”
The Ultimate Aesthete
When George Howell moved from California to Boston in March 1974, he went through withdrawal. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1968 to 1974, Howell was used to specialty coffees. In Boston, “I couldn’t get good coffee to save my life,” he recalled. He tried the yellow pages. Nothing. He sought out expensive cheese shops that had bulk whole beans, but they had been sitting in bins so long that they were hopelessly stale. In desperation, he decided to start his own coffeehouse, buying his beans from Erna Knutsen.
Howell came at coffee as an aesthetic experience. He had studied art history and literature at Yale before opening an art gallery in California. “I saw the coffeehouse as a natural for me. It provided a place to exhibit art, and then there was the pleasure of the drink itself.”
With the help of his wife, Laurie, and partner, Michael Da Silva, Howell opened the Coffee Connection in Harvard Square in April 1975. They sold whole beans but also added a coffee bar with tiny press pots. “We were an overnight success,” Howell recalled. He set up a small Probat roaster ten miles away in Burlington, Massachusetts, and stayed up every night, learning to roast. “Customer enthusiasm covered us. They were like parched people coming out of a desert and finding an oasis.”
Specialty Proliferates
In the early 1970s specialty coffee roasters and coffeehouses began to appear with increasing frequency in the United States and Canada. In Juneau, Alaska, Grady Saunders opened Quaffs, later changing the name to Heritage Coffee Company. Paul and Kathy Leighton commenced business as the Coffee Corner in Eugene, Oregon, while Bob Sinclair served coffee in Pannikin Coffee & Tea in San Diego. Bill Boyer started Boyer Coffee Company in Denver, and Marty Elkin ran Superior Coffee (later renamed Elkin’s) in New Hampshire. In Canada, there was Murchie’s in Vancouver. In Toronto, Timothy Snellgrove founded Timothy’s Coffees of the World, while Frank O’Dea and Tom Culligan opened the Second Cup in a Toronto mall.
Enthusiastic young men branched off from family coffee businesses when they caught the specialty bug. In tidewater Virginia, third-generation Gill Brockenbrough founded First Colony, while Alan Rossman started Van Courtland Coffee, a specialty branch of Wechsler’s, a longtime New York institutional roaster. With partner Hy Chabott, Donald Schoenholt opened several Gillies specialty retail stores in Manhattan. In Pittsburgh, Nick Nicholas transformed Nicholas Coffee into a regional specialty company. Peter Longo carried on Porto Rico Importing, the family retail outlet in Greenwich Village. Mark and Mike Mountanos, brothers from a San Francisco coffee family, opened separate businesses as green coffee dealers and roasters, respectively, while Pete McLaughlin at Royal vied with Erna Knutsen to supply the specialty trade with the finest beans. Luciano Repetto followed the family tradition at Graffeo, roasting an arabica blend for fine local restaurants.
Several authoritative books about coffee appeared around this time, testifying to the renewed public interest in fine coffee. For a year, English professor Kenneth Davids owned a coffeehouse in Berkeley, then wrote Coffee: A Guide to Buying, Brewing & Enjoying, where readers could learn the fundamentals, including a country-by-country taste assessment, advice on grinders, and brewing instructions. Joel Schapira, with father David and brother Karl, wrote The Book of Coffee & Tea.
Another hopeful sign for coffee appeared in October 1972, with the introduction of the Mr. Coffee automatic electric drip brewer. Bunn-O-Matic and Cory had been making commercial versions for restaurants for nearly two decades, but Mr. Coffee marked the first venture into the home brewing market. Competitors such as Braun, General Electric, Melitta, Norelco, Proctor-Silex, Sunbeam, and West Bend quickly jumped into the fray. By 1974 half of the 10 million coffeemakers sold in the United States
were electric drip. Although the new home brewers had their faults—insufficiently hot water, wrong brew times, hot plates that ruined coffee left too long—they were a huge advance over pumping percolators, and they encouraged the rise of better quality coffee.102
A few popular magazines discovered specialty coffees in the early 1970s. Sunset offered a simple explanation of acidity, body, roasts, and blends in a 1972 article. “Special coffee stores are worth searching out. One big reason is that there you can talk to someone whose business is coffee.” Yet the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal largely ignored the nascent specialty coffee movement. Nor did the big roasters pay much attention. “They thought it was a fad, like blue Jell-O, and that it would go away,” Donald Schoenholt recalled.
In 1972 General Foods came out with flavored instants. The pricey “International” line, containing soluble coffee, nondairy creamer, sugar, and flavorings, claimed to possess “the same great coffee flavor you’d find abroad.” Hills Brothers and Carnation followed with their own versions. Though these parodies of high-quality coffee, advertised as indulgences, garnered some market share, they were about as far from Peet’s beans as they could get.
Mrs. Olson Slugs It Out with Aunt Cora
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World Page 34