JUST AS Silicon Valley’s high-tech economy was poised for an era of explosive growth in the early 1980s, the South Bay’s coffee scene came into its own, too. In many ways, the high-tech industry and South Bay coffeehouse culture grew up together, a phenomenon that wasn’t entirely coincidental. Silicon Valley would still have lifted off without the aid of caffeine, but good coffee certainly didn’t hurt.
Caffeine is the one socially accepted drug for our work-obsessed culture in which long days and long nights are de rigueur. Coffee is the juice that keeps Silicon Valley’s circuitry buzzing.
According to a study published last year by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, caffeinated workers are better workers. The study found that caffeine “significantly reduced the number of errors” and increased work performance.
The take-away message? Forget rest. Have another latte.
While the study focused on “shift workers”—those who work hours other than 9 to 5—the data reinforce what many of all already know: coffee helps you to stay alert and get through the day. Did you think your employer was providing you with free pots of coffee just to be nice? Get back to work.
Of course, coffee is more than fuel for worker bees. When made well with fresh-roasted beans, coffee happens to taste really good, promote conversation and make people happy. It’s one of life’s little pleasures.
Before there were social networks and online communities, the coffeehouse was where Silicon Valley networked in real time. And while patrons are more apt to have their noses in their laptops these days (no doubt connecting with their “community”) Silicon Valley coffeehouses, cafes and coffee bars are still hubs of face-to-face social interaction.
In the Beginning
It all started in Los Gatos in 1982. Way back then, there was no Internet. Cell phones did not exist. Apple was in its infancy. Hewlett-Packard was making dot matrix printers. Yahoo, google and twitter were just goofy words, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t even been born yet.
It was also very difficult to get a good cup of coffee.
But that year, Los Gatos native Teri Hope struck upon a novel idea: Instead of driving to San Francisco or the East Bay for a cup of fresh-roasted coffee, she would open a cafe in her hometown.
Hope had fond memories of the aroma and taste of fresh-roasted coffee at a roastery she visited with her mother in downtown San Jose as a child. For her, the smell of coffee was comforting, stimulating and euphoric.
“It had such a profound effect on my sensory memory,” she says.
While Graffeo and Trieste in San Francisco and Peet’s in Berkeley sold good coffee, Hope’s idea for her business was different. She combined retail coffee-bean sales, a roastery and a coffee bar all provided with beans she procured herself. Doing all three under one roof was something that hadn’t been widely tried at the time.
Although people were skeptical about such a business—and that it would be run by a woman—the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Co. has become a Silicon Valley institution that helped give rise to a thriving coffeehouse scene that keeps the South Bay a-twitter.
When Hope first opened, she offered a menu of just five coffee drinks, and for many customers the lattes and macchiatos were foreign territory. “They needed to be educated. People at that time thought coffee came in a can.”
In addition to a place for good coffee, the cafe offered a space for the community to gather away from home and from work, a so-called “third place.”
“It was a phenomenon that didn’t exist in our culture at the time. There was a need for it,” she explains. “I think there’s a need for humans to be together. This is a second family for many people. It’s feels safe and comforting.”
The Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Co. became so successful that Starbucks once came calling. Hope recalls that the Seattle company tempted her with $5 million for her business. And if she wouldn’t sell, the coffee giant threatened to open an outlet across the street and put her out of business, she says.
Hope declined the offer. It wasn’t enough money, and she didn’t want to give up her business. “I really love what I do.” So do her employees, several of whom who have been with her for years. Kentucky-born Tim McKinney has been Hope’s roast master for more than a quarter-century.
As a pioneering business, the cafe has inspired many others across the valley, and Hope has mentored many newcomers, especially women.
“I think I played a significant role in it evolving the way it did.”
And evolve it did.
For Every Taste
Today, it’s rare to find a commercial block or mall not occupied by a cafe or coffeehouse. While Seattle is regarded as America’s coffee capital, it’s easy to find a great cup of coffee in Silicon Valley with plenty of atmosphere dispensed on the side.
Good coffee—fresh-roasted premium beans expertly brewed—is essential, but so too is a distinctive setting in which that brew is served. As the accompanying list of local cafes reveals, there’s a cafe for every taste—Bohemian coffeehouses, folksy live-music venues and frenetic cafes where the tinkling of spoons in cups keep pace with the clatter of fingertips on laptops as the digital generation stays connected with the help of WiFi and lots of caffeine.
But it all starts with the coffee. We’re living in the golden age of the mighty bean, an era often referred to as coffee’s “third wave.”
The first wave of American coffee culture began in the 19th century with canned coffee—coffee of dubious quality but full of potent caffeine to keep an industrializing nation on the go.
The second wave began in the 1960s when Peet’s in Berkeley sold fresh-roasted beans. A little shop called Starbucks in Seattle got into the action and soon introduced the nation to such java exotica as espresso, cappuccino and the soy milk Frappucino as well as coffee beans bearing country of origin. San Francisco’s Caffe Trieste (which opened a location in San Jose a few years back), Vesuvio’s and Graffeo had stepped onto the scene earlier, but the Italian-inspired, bohemian haunts didn’t have national ambitions like Starbucks or Peet’s.
The third wave of coffee focuses not just on country of origin but also on particular farms and even individual farmers. Like wine lovers, the coffee aficionado now speaks of details like altitude, climate and soil composition as well as roasting style, brewing technology and water temperature in the pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee.
Refined Beans
If there’s a place that invites coffee worship, it’s downtown San Jose’s Red Berry. The coffee bar is small, maybe a half-dozen tables. The white melamine resin bar invites patrons to belly up and linger over cups of extraordinary coffee. Red Berry serves a revolving list of premium coffee from local roasters: Barefoot, Verve, Ritual, De La Paz and Ecco. A specials board lists the brews of the day.
“We’re at the intersection between art and food,” says manager Chris Yu Gaoiran as he crafts a cup of cappuccino.
Sampling coffee made with a gleaming Dalla Corte espresso machine that allows him to brew with a choice of three different temperatures (the hotter the water, the more acidic and intensely flavored the espresso), it’s easy to appreciate that coffee is an agricultural product and must be handled with care.
A double shot of espresso is standard in Red Berry’s cappuccinos. Once the espresso is in a ceramic cup (don’t insult the coffee by asking for it to go in a paper cup; take five minutes to enjoy it on the spot), Yu Gaoiran swirls the frothy brew to incorporate the crema, which settles on the top and has a biting flavor that’s best when blended into the espresso.
Then he adds a stream of thick, densely aerated “micro-foamed” steamed milk that’s poured into the coffee rather than sitting on top of it like a cloudy lump. The result is pleasantly bitter, smooth, rich and a little sweet. It is sublime.
Yu Gaoiran describes roasting and brewing coffee as being like sculpture, when skilled hands chip away to reveal the essence of the bean within.
“Everyone along the supply chain is very important,” he says, from grower to barista. Although the cafe has WiFi, Yu Gaoiran says most customers stop in for a quick chat. He calls cafes “the original social network.”
He cites a quote from compulsory-education critic John Taylor Gatto to bolster his point: “We live in networks not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that.”
A good cafe, he insists, serve up coffee as well as community.
Coffee Essence
One of the stars in Silicon Valley’s coffee scene is Santa Clara’s Barefoot Coffee Works. The 7-year-old company was named as one of the top four roasters in the country by Food & Wine magazine.
The roaster and cafe was recently sold, but founder Andy Newbom still sources the coffee himself. He was in El Salvador this month doing just that. Inside the cafe, located rather incongruously in an unremarkable shopping center off El Camino Real, the walls are hung with photos of coffee farmers.
The bags of coffee for sale on the shelf bear not just the origin of the coffee but also the name of the farmer who grew it. The cafe makes espresso drinks, of course, but also has a brew bar where coffee is made with fresh-roasted beans to order.
When the cafe first opened, the menu of coffee drinks was more extensive, with lots of sugary, whipped-cream-on-top beverages, but after a remodel this summer, the place has paired down its menu and serves a back-to-basics coffee connoisseur menu.
“It’s all been a journey to get here,” says Ollie Moore, cafe manager. “It took a little bit of time to show people what we were about.”
What they’re about is respecting the coffee farmers with each cup of coffee they make. “The end result is going to be the best representation of the coffee we can manage,” he says. “I have a product that I believe in and that I can share with people. It’s an extension of the relationship we have with our farmers.”
The cafe attracts a diverse clientele—students, business types and even families.
“It’s a reasonably unpretentious place even though we kind of consider ourselves coffee snobs,” he says.
Barefoot recently closed two new locations in San Jose because of poor sales: the Karma Bar inside Good Karma restaurant and the Roll Up Bar adjacent to the company’s roasting facility. Plans are still in the works to open a new cafe in the soon-to-open San Pedro Square market.
The appeal of the Santa Clara cafe, and cafes in general, is the social interaction coupled with good coffee.
“We’re social creatures at the end of the day,” he says. “We like to be around each other. A coffeehouse does a really good job of securing that for people.
