Plenty's brewing on Seattle coffee tour
City's java history doesn't just begin with Starbucks
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Jimi Hendrix, grunge music, rare books, bondage attire and a gay bar named for the stripper who lost her leg to a confetti cannonball.
Who knew a “coffee culture” tour of Seattle could cover so much ground in 90 minutes — long before the first mention of Starbucks?
Carter, our dynamic guide from WeVenture (we-venture.com/seattle), took us away from tourist traffic, up Capitol Hill, where she showed 19th-century mansions of the city’s founding timber and mining families, now repurposed or subdivided into apartments and studios.
Here in the 1950s and ’60s, a nascent arts community took root with beat poets and lots of political discourse. Their coffee houses further strengthened the bohemian bastion, which soon included an LBTGQ community and became the site of protests, right up to the George Floyd marches.
As we pause at the Hendrix statue, near the home in which Jimi learned to play right-handed guitar upside down, Carter points out shops for horror, sci-fi, leather masks, fine lace, modern and vintage clothing all “living in boisterous harmony” with restaurants and residents.
Near here, exotic dancer Shelly Bauman was enjoying a rowdy 1970 Bastille Day parade that was to climax with a cannon burst of confetti. But excess liquor dripped into the barrel and the contents solidified, striking Bauman and requiring amputation. With her settlement cash from the city, she opened Shelly’s Leg, the first gay nightclub in town. Sadly, Braun saw that business burn down, but her spirit lives on in village bars such as Wildrose.
Back to coffee and our first ‘cupping’ in the Elliott Bay Book Company store, inspiration for Cafe Nervosa in TV’s Frazier. While many in the world are content with coffee’s stimulating effects and need no further primer, Carter reminds it was shepherds in ancient Ethiopia who noticed goats becoming hyper after eating certain fruits off bushes.
Today, the sophisticated coffee palate can detect traces of marionberry, lingonberry and citrus.
Elliott’s is ideal to sip espresso, often credited to American GIs in Second World War Italy who gradually added the right flow of hot water to dilute the strong local brew. Carter’s coffee wheel chart lays out how to fully enjoy the crema foam, body and sugary molasses kick.
On to newly opened Wunderground, which infuses mushrooms in its coffee, deliciously balancing caffeine with calming antioxidants of the fungi. This notion has caught on as far away as China, where the specialty medicinal mushrooms are grown. After a sample of Rey Amargo iced Mexican cacao and a peek inside Salt and Straw where many queue for coffee-flavoured ice cream, it was time for Seattle’s most famous export.
Dutch salesman Alfred Peet had come to San Francisco pushing his high-quality Arabica coffee beans, prompting three college students to start their own business in Seattle’s popular Pike Market in 1971. Looking for a powerful-sounding brand name that began with ‘St’ consonants, they chose the character Starbuck from Moby Dick. The trio soon bought out Peet and began serving their product espresso and put tall, venti and grande into our lexicon, quickly spreading it East and over the border to Vancouver. Intrigued why so many of his coffee filters were in demand in Seattle, New Yorker Howard Schultz flew out to investigate and eventually became CEO of close to 33,000 outlets in 79 countries.
The Starbucks Reserve Roastery, which supplies stores in a 1,600-kilometre radius from Seattle, is lively and noisy, evoking both an old Euro brewery and Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. The public are close enough in this 1,400-square-metre site (one of six worldwide) to hear beans crack at just the right temperature, take in their aroma, have staff explain what differing degrees mean to mild and strong coffee, and see up to eight different prep methods. It’s open at 7 a.m. for morning people and offers its own tour.
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