This morning, as I sipped my Italian Roast coffee, I thought about Alfred Peet. He died last week after changing the world during his lifetime.

It was 1977 in Berkeley, California when I wandered into one of his stores for the first time. The wonderful coffee aroma wafting from the store drew me in.

The menu board was filled with names of coffees I'd never heard of: Mocha Java, Sumatra, and French Roast. I didn't know what they were, but the aromas told me that they weren't anything like the "coffee" everyone drank when I was growing up.

We drank what New Yorkers called "regular coffee," which meant "with lots of cream and sugar." The reason we drank it that way was that the coffee itself was pretty dreadful.

I remember sitting at dinner with a family friend. I must have been in my early teens. The friend, who had grown up in Europe, was lamenting that in America "you can't get decent beer, bread or coffee."

That's changed in my lifetime. Alfred Peet changed the coffee part.

Peet was born in the Netherlands and learned how to buy, select and prepare coffee in a variety of jobs before he landed in San Francisco in the fifties. He was appalled at the quality of the coffee that Americans drank.

In 1966 he opened a small shop on Vine Street in Berkeley. That's the shop I visited a decade later.

By then Peet's was well known in the area. The shop was filled with people drinking coffee and tea and talking. People came in to purchase coffee to make at home and left clutching their bags.

It was a strange and exotic place to me. A young man asked me if I needed help and when I confessed that I did, he seemed to take it as a sacred duty to teach me about coffee and Peet's.

Over the next hour he explained different roasts and let me taste each one. We decided on a blend and I bought my first cup of what is often called "gourmet" coffee. It's no such thing. It's just good.

In the last thirty years, many of us in America have discovered good coffee. Starbucks and a dozen or so national and regional Starbucks clones have brought coffee shops to our streets and bags of their coffee to our supermarkets.

Not one was like Peet's. Peet's the store and Alfred Peet, the man, were originals.

It was Peet who taught the founders of Starbucks the coffee roasting trade and who sold them their coffee. Jerry Baldwin, one of those founders, sits on the board of the now-public Peet's.

The publicly held company is very different from the company that Alfred Peet ran. Before he retired in 1983, he had only four stores, all of them in the Bay Area.

Could Peet's have grown as Starbucks has? Probably, but that wasn't what Alfred Peet wanted. He loved scouring the earth for great coffee and preparing it well. He loved his retail stores. He didn't want to run a big company.

There are a couple of lessons here. Alfred Peet built his company on his strengths and preferences. He was successful by any reasonable measure without succumbing to the "bigger is the only better" philosophy that seems to grip much of American business.

Despite choosing to keep his business small, Peet had a major impact on America. When he arrived here he is reputed to have thought "Why does the richest country in the world have the lousiest coffee?" Today, quality coffee is everywhere.

You'll probably have a cup of good coffee today. When you do, stop and remember Alfred Peet. Without his work and his passion, who knows what you'd be drinking.

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