| Coffee maker Albert Peet dies
Albert Peet, founder of Peet's Coffee & Tea who opened his first Berkeley, Calif., store 41 years ago, has died at age 87, the company said Friday.
Peet died Wednesday at his Ashland, Ore., home, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Peet opened his first store in 1966, followed by outlets in Menlo Park (1971), Piedmont Avenue in Oakland (1978) and another Berkeley store across from the Claremont Hotel in 1980. He retired in 1983.
A native of Alkmaar, Holland, he did odd jobs at his father's coffee roastery in Alkmaar before World War II. After the war, Peet apprenticed at Lipton's Tea in London, then worked in the tea business in Indonesia before migrating to San Francisco in 1955 and joining the coffee importer E.A. Johnson & Co.
He opened his first Peet's at Walnut and Vine streets in Berkeley, installing a small roaster in the shop's back room.
On those iced tea orders, specify everything to a T
Now that a dining companion has taken to ordering iced tea "60-40" -- the desired ratio of sweet to unsweet -- and not been shot, I've decided there's no excuse for anything but clear communication between diner and server about tea. Not to mention everything else. So I appreciated a recent thread on a food Web site about missing modifiers -- words that servers should volunteer for clarity or that diners should ask further about, to be sure. People complained about ordering "tea" and not getting what they wanted. Some wanted plain and got fruit-flavored; some wanted sweet and got unsweet, some wanted hot and got cold (no, they weren't from around here). So whose responsibility is this? Everyone's, in an ideal world. But barring that, I'd break it down this way: • Diners should specify sweet or unsweet or hot when they expect basic and ubiquitous orange pekoe (which is a form of black tea: think Lipton).
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