Alfred Peet

Who was Alfred Peet?

Alfred H. Peet was a Dutch-American entrepreneur and the founder of Peet's Coffee & Tea in Berkeley, California, in 1966. He is most famous for introducing custom coffee roasting to the United States.

Peet was born in Alkmaar, Netherlands, where his father ran a small coffee roastery before World War II. After the war, Peet left London, where he had apprenticed with a coffee and tea company, and worked as a tea taster in the Dutch East Indies and New Zealand before immigrating to San Francisco, California in 1955, where he worked in the coffee importing industry.

After becoming dismayed at the poor quality of coffee in the United States, he opened his own coffee store in Berkeley, California, in 1966, and soon opened new stores in Oakland, Mill Valley and Menlo Park.

Peet taught his style of roasting beans to Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker, who took the technique to Seattle and founded Starbucks in 1971. Peet is widely credited with starting the specialty coffee revolution in the US. Among coffee historians, Peet is labeled as "the Dutchman who taught America how to drink coffee."