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Gourmet Coffee History

Coffee Quality

Coffee does not have to be expensive to be great, but quality really does matter. The quality of coffee starts with the quality of the green (raw) beans. You cannot make a good cup of coffee from a bad selection of green coffee beans. There are two species of the coffee plant, Arabica and Robusta.

Specialty or Gourmet Coffee is 100% Arabica Coffee. Arabica coffee is more expensive than Robusta, because of its superior quality and flavor, but it also needs the right climate, elevation and care to grow. Robusta coffee is used in lower quality less expensive coffees because it is low-priced and can grow in virtually any climate at any elevation with little to no care.

Coffee Cupping

Cupping is a method of systematically evaluating the aroma and taste of coffee beans. It is often used by growers, buyers and roasters to assess the quality of a particular coffee sample. Proper cupping requires the adherence to an exacting set of brewing standards and a formal step-by-step evaluation process. For a Coffee Roaster, a great Coffee Cupper is essential in selecting the finest beans. A trained cupper generally looks at six characteristics:

Fragrance: The smell of beans after grinding
Aroma: The smell of ground-up beans after being steeped in water
Taste: The flavor of the coffee
Nose: The vapors released by the coffee in the mouth
Aftertaste: The vapors and flavors that remain after swallowing
Body: The feel of the coffee in the mouth

Coffee in the United States

United States was probably the last country in America to introduce the taste of coffee, and even more the taste of gourmet coffee.

It wasn't until about 1683 that Americans discovered coffee. New York, known as New Amsterdam at the time, was a tea totaling city, still borrowing the afternoon tea habits of their English brothers. One of the first recorded coffee drinkers was William Penn, who, once having settled in his Pennsylvania Colony, hired a New York importer to secure a stash of coffee for his personal use.

Strangely enough, this trend toward coffee in America can be largely attributed to tea. In 1773, our Bostonian ancestors hosted the Boston Tea Party, proclaiming freedom from colonists and selected coffee as the patriotic beverage of choice.

When Alfred Peet, a son of an Amsterdam coffee trader, moved from Amsterdam to the United States in 1955, there wasn’t a cup of gourmet coffee to be found anywhere. In Europe, people were used to enjoying a fine cup of fresh coffee, brewed from the best Arabica beans.

At that time, in the US, the big coffee companies were selling low quality ground coffee in cans which sat on supermarket shelves for months. There was no good gourmet coffee, except that of Murchies, based in Vancouver, Canada.

In 1966 he opened a small coffee store on Vine Street in Berkley, California. There he began to sell his dark roasted coffee beans. (The big companies made their coffee from medium roasted beans. The more you roast the beans, the more moisture you lose and, if you sell by weight, the less money you make.)

Peet’s has served the needs of gourmet coffee drinkers in southern California, and still does, but three of their customers had the idea of opening the same kind of store up in Seattle.

Gerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Ziv Siegel opened the first Starbucks store in 1971. It was based in Pike’s Market on the Seattle waterfront. (Pike’s Market is a great place, filled with all kinds of specialty stores.) To begin with, until they got their first roaster, they bought their beans from Alfred Peet.

Starbucks was successful right from the start, tapping into people’s desire for a good cup of gourmet coffee, and turning a profit from day one.

If you want to make a perfect cup of gourmet coffee, all you need is a handful of beans, a $15 grinder and a $10 filter cone drip brewer.