Does the corner of Walnut & Vine streets in Berkeley mean anything to you? It didn’t to me, other than the fact that it is a block away from where I grew up. I do remember it as a quiet corner with a Friends (Quaker) Meeting House facing two non-descript stores, which seemed to be empty much of the time. On the fourth corner was a Mormon Church, which, on Sundays, attracted quite a crowd of non-coffee drinkers (the faith preaches against the use of tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine). Little did they realize the temptation that would arise directly across the street.
Folgers Coffee building, on the corner of Howard and Spear streets. People would sit in the corner window, at a large round table, to taste the daily coffee roast.
By Wes Starratt
Published: December, 2005
Does the corner of Walnut & Vine streets in Berkeley mean anything to you? It didn’t to me, other than the fact that it is a block away from where I grew up. I do remember it as a quiet corner with a Friends (Quaker) Meeting House facing two non-descript stores, which seemed to be empty much of the time. On the fourth corner was a Mormon Church, which, on Sundays, attracted quite a crowd of non-coffee drinkers (the faith preaches against the use of tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine). Little did they realize the temptation that would arise directly across the street.
It was on that corner, in the year 1966, that Dutch coffee roaster Alfred Peet opened his very first Peet’s Coffee and Tea, and began serving a strong, darkly roasted coffee that caught on and developed a following of its own; its patrons known as Peatniks. Since then, more than 100 Peet’s coffee shops have been opened throughout the West and eastward as far as Boston. But, it didn’t take more than five years before a rival, known as Starbucks, opened its first coffee house in Seattle’s Pike Place Public Market.
The history of these two coffee firms has been intertwined ever since, with Starbucks buying Peet’s, one at one time, and later selling out to a one-time Peet’s employee who developed Starbucks into a multi-national empire that went public in January 2001.
What can certainly be called a coffee revolution started on the corner of Walnut and Vine in little old Berkeley, and Peet’s is still there serving coffee, which is now roasted in its own facility in Emeryville.
Back to the Gold Rush
Coffee was very much a part of the Bay Area long before Mr. Peet arrived from Holland. Let’s go back to 1849 and the California Gold Rush. That’s where we meet 18-year-old Jim Folger from Nantucket, who arrived with his two brothers to mine for gold. His brothers did the mining, and Jim remained in San Francisco where he was hired as a carpenter to build The Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills, which would become the first business on the coast to roast, grind, and package coffee, thus eliminating the need for consumers to do their own roasting and grinding —quite a convenience.
After a stint in the gold fields, Folger apparently earned enough money to buy the coffee roasting plant, and in 1872 renamed it J. A. Folger & Company. Its principal product was bulk-roasted coffee that was sold to grocery stories, but the plant also produced ground coffee sold in tins and labeled with the picture of a ship in San Francisco Bay. In 1904, Folger built a new coffee roasting plant on the corner of Howard and Spear streets, a building that survived the 1906 Earthquake and has since been strengthened to survive the next quake. Today, it is an office building, with a bronze plaque inscribed, The Folger Coffee Company.
Folger’s was followed in the coffee roasting business in 1878 by two brothers, Austin and Reuben Hills, who began roasting coffee at San Francisco’s Bay City Market. Hills Bros business grew substantially after the 1906 Earthquake, building on its introduction of vacuum packing and controlled roasting. Roasting operations moved into the landmark brick structure built along the Embarcadero in 1925. The building, almost under the Bay Bridge, has since been renovated into an apartment-commercial center, as a part of San Francisco’s Rincon Hill Development.
A third major entry into the coffee roasting business in San Francisco was Joseph Brandenstein, who opened a coffee roasting plant in about 1896, J.J. Brandenstein & Company, and sold coffee under the name of MJB Coffee, named after his son Max. That business also grew, and the roasting plant later moved to a new building on Third Street.
Still another major player in the coffee roasting business was A. A. Schilling & Co., established in 1881 as a coffee roaster and also a spice mill. It was located in a red brick building with concrete silos, located on the corner of Second and Harrison streets.
In addition to these major players, there were numerous smaller coffee roasting plants throughout the waterfront area. In fact, the Port of San Francisco grew into one of America’s largest coffee ports, just behind New Orleans, as I recall. By the 1920s, coffee and spices had become San Francisco’s second largest industry (behind printing and publishing), and the Port’s second import commodity, in terms of value (below raw silk but above raw sugar). Burlap bags of green coffee beans were arriving by ship from Central America and the South Pacific Islands, unloaded on pallets at wharfs along the Embarcadero, and trucked to the various nearby coffee-roasting plants.
Aroma of Roasting Coffee
Picture the commuter arriving by ferry from the East Bay at that time and disembarking at the Ferry Building. With four major coffee roasters, and dozens of smaller ones within walking distance, the commuter was met with an intoxicating aroma of coffee… It literally hit you in the face. Coffee, coffee, everywhere … We must be in San Francisco! The smell pervaded the entire downtown area. Air pollution, perhaps it was, but it smelled awfully good.
As a child, I can remember finding the coffee aroma absolutely irresistible, and persuading my mother to visit the Folger Coffee plant on the corner of Howard and Spear streets. There in the corner window was a large round table complete with coffee cups. Seated on one or more chairs were the coffee tasters taking in mouths-full of freshly brewed coffee, swirling it around, and spitting it into convenient brass spittoons adjacent to the chairs. Tasting appears to have gone on hour-after-hour, with each batch of roasted coffee given the expert taste test. I found it absolutely fascinating to watch the coffee tasters, there in the window. It was also interesting to see the coffee roasters in operation on the top floor. Naturally, we switched to drinking Folgers coffee at home.
Vanishing Coffee Roasters
Moving the scene to the post war years, all of the City’s major coffee roasters, one by one, were bought by national companies, and the San Francisco roasting plants closed. Folgers was bought by Procter & Gamble, and the coffee roasting operation was moved to Kansas City. Hills Bros first became part of Nestle Beverage Company, and later was acquired by Sara Lee Corp., along with MJB Coffee. Schilling was taken over by the spice firm, McCormick & Company. All of them closed their coffee roasting operations in San Francisco, and today, the pervading aroma of roasting coffee no longer blasts commuters in the face when they disembark at the Ferry Building. It’s just not the same, and doesn’t smell like San Francisco anymore — at least not in the Financial District.
North Beach Comes Alive
San Francisco has many traditions. Among them are the stores and restaurants that have catered over the years to what was originally an Italian fishing community in North Beach, the community that made Fishermen’s Wharf world-famous. It was Italian traders who first introduced coffee to Europe in the year 1600. Since then, Italy’s strong, dark coffee has become world-famous too. The first espresso coffee machine was developed in Italy, shortly after World War II, and the product was named cappuccino after the color of the robes of the monks of the Capuchin order.
With that rich coffee tradition, it is not surprising to find an Italian immigrant, Giovanni Giotta, opening the City’s first traditional Italian espresso coffee house in the 1950s — Caffe Trieste on Vallejo Street. Its success has been based not only on espresso-making, but also on buying the best coffee beans, roasting them yourself, and brewing each cup to order. Before long, other Italian espresso coffee houses, such as Caffe Roma on Columbus Ave., began to appear in North Beach, most of them roasting their own coffee beans.
Coffee is, once again, being roasted in ever greater quantities in San Francisco. And while it is not on the large industrial scale as it once was, and the aroma of roasted coffee does not pervade the entire city, as it once did, the rich aroma is still wonderfully evident throughout some local neighborhoods.
Today, the pervading aroma of roasting coffee no longer blasts commuters in the face when they desembark at the Ferry Building.
• Coffee no longer arrives on the San Francisco Waterfront in burlap bags from the far corners of the Pacific. It is now received in 40-ft containers at the Port Of Oakland.
• Statistics show 90,700 metric tons of coffee, spices and tea were imported in 2004, the latest year for which statistics are available.Some of the coffee may be destined for Chase & Sanborn's plant in San Leandro, but much of it is destined for specialty roasters like Peet's, and neighborhood coffee houses like Caffe Trieste in San Francisco's North Beach.
The former Hills Bros coffee plant on the corner of Harrison Street and the Embarcadero, now a commercial-residential structure, a part of the Rincon Hill Redevelopment Program.
