While these days Peter Giuliano is a man infamous for his contribution to the coffee world (and his unfathomable depths of knowledge on so many aspects of it), the way that he began in the industry was purely by being in the right place at the right time.

His career started 1988 in Encinitas, in a small beach city where, according to Peter, “there were very few kids that had blue hair – you know, that kind of kid – and I was one of those kids. You hung around in one of three places if you were that type of kid – one was a record store, one was a used clothing shop, and one was this coffee shop called Pannikin. So, I would hang around in all three of those places, then one day, in the coffee shop, someone said to me ‘somebody didn’t show up for work, Peter, can you work a shift?’ then they handed me an apron, I started in coffee that day, and I’ve never worked any other job since.”

“I think most people, when they start in coffee, it’s just a job that they’re doing while they try to do something else.” But something clicked for him when “…I realised that I knew very little about the coffee, in fact, I would have to make stuff up, because there was no information. I would tell people the origin of the cappuccino—which was a complete fabrication on my part—just to have something to talk to them about at the bar. That’s when I fell in love with the idea of making the coffee really good and training other people to make coffee really well… there was no training to speak of at the shop at that time, and that’s really what I got interested in doing.”

Peter’s aspiration was always to be a coffee trainer, but in the beginning, there wasn’t the space nor the time to do so, “All I wanted to do was do the education piece, but I kept having to do the business piece, so I ended up doing the education piece at night.”

Then, in 2000, he got a call from a small coffee roaster called Counter Culture in North Carolina that needed a coffee guy. Needing a seachange, Peter took the opportunity.

“I could see that Counter Culture had a lot of potential; before I got there they were doing really good quality coffee in the south-east where great quality coffee wasn’t very common-place. When I got there we started to work with coffee farmers directly which was a big important thing to me, then we did training centres, educational places—which was a manifestation, right, of what I’d been trying to do this whole time—so that’s what the last 12 or 13 years have been like.”

Back in 1988 when he started, specialty coffee was moving along steadily, “There had been this wave of specialty coffee; it started in the late 60s, and it sort of touched everyone. The same way we think about the vanguard of coffee companies now that are spread out and all know each other, it was the same way back then but it was different companies. It was Peets in San Francisco, Pannikin in San Diego, Starbucks in Seattle, Coffee Connection in Boston (and a few others), and they all felt like islands. They were all doing their own thing, but they were connected in a way.”

“I think that people now think that coffee was really bad back then, but it wasn’t. The roasting was definitely darker than it is today, but there was a lot of delicious coffee happening – really good coffee from Antigua [Guatemala], Indonesia, Yirgacheffe [Ethiopia], etc. People were very proud of roasting darker in those days because commercial coffee was roasted light, so that was a big point of distinction. Good coffee was roasted dark, and coffee that was roasted light was Folgers and MJB, so that’s kind of flipped now.”

Then in 1994 there came a change, with Starbucks arriving in San Diego which, in turn, morphed the coffee culture from the traditional drink-in coffeehouse style to more a fast-food oriented environment. “Coffee boomed between 1995/6 and the mid-200s, but it boomed in a very fast-food way: even in great coffee shops, their growth became reliant on to-go coffee business, and with that, the whole coffee industry became this quick service model. Then, in the mid-2000s we started to have a reaction to that, because we’d gotten way too deep in the fast food thing, and we had to try consciously to reclaim the slow aspect of coffee… and I think that’s what we’re in at the moment.”

For Peter, there have been a number of reasons why he’s stayed in the coffee industry for 24 years, “First, it was legitimising my craft. I was working as a barista, and I got to be proud of it, and I knew that it took craft and skill – not only to make the drinks, but also to be able to relate to people over the counter – but my parents thought of me as a fast food employee. They were all like, ‘what are you doing? You’re supposed to be in law school (or whatever they wanted me to do)’, and that’s why I focused on education: it was about legitimising the job.”

“Then, I started to get fascinated with the idea that coffee could bring people closer together. One of the most important things that happened to me while working in a coffee shop is that I learned to speak Spanish because of a co-worker, who didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Spanish. In working together I learned not only to speak Spanish, but also his life story as an illegal immigrant from Mexico to the United States.”

“Through that lens I started to travel to other parts of Latin America for coffee. In the United States, even though we’re a nation of immigrants, we can be insulated and intolerant. I thought that if people got to know the places and the people that produce their coffee for them, if they felt close to them because of coffee, then they could feel close to them as human beings as well. I think that if we can feel close to our coffee farmers the way we feel close to the farmers that we see every week at the farmers’ market, then that can make us better citizens of the world, and we can make better political decisions and be more tolerant and less xenophobic. Coffee is all produced in the developing world and all consumed in the developed world, so coffee itself can be a way to address those kinds of inequities”

“That really motivated me in coffee for a long time. Now, I’m still interested in both of those things but I’m also very interested in coffee as agriculture, and how we can be a model for other kinds of agriculture. Sustainable agriculture is in most cases an oxymoron, whether its coffee, wheat, rice, corn, or green beans, we’re depleting the land as we feed ourselves… and we can’t continue to do that.”

“So, if we can use coffee as a way to lead agriculture by being truly sustainable, by celebrating sustainable coffees—that are just as spectacular and exciting from a flavour perspective as any coffees we have—if we can prove that we can have the quality and sustainability of agriculture, and equitable trade in coffee, then that will spread to other kinds of agriculture. In all of these elements it’s about living up to the hype of what we can be and what we want to be. At this moment I feel an obligation to live up to our potential, and wanting to do that is what’s keeping me in it.”

At this moment in the specialty coffee industry, “We’ve achieved so much. It’s astonishing, I think, when we step back. Suddenly we’ve got people who are receptive to the idea of origin and coffee, and that didn’t even exist before. We’ve got a level of dialogue, and we’ve got baristas who are capable of doing all these things that they weren’t capable of before.”

And, as for the future of coffee, Giuliano believes that, “Yes, we have achieved a lot, but we still have a lot to do. As we’ve gotten better about understanding flavour and exploring it, I think we’ve gotten a little distracted by it. We chase flavour—which is one thing that makes specialty coffee exciting—but we really need to develop the experience a little bit better. We’ve talked about it here at TED a few time; we’re so focused on delivering flavour that we focus solely on that and we leave the customer out of the process - we don’t create a complete experience for them. We give them a cup of flavour and expect them to contextualise that themselves.”

“I think that we need to get a lot better at understanding the complexities of coffee ourselves and then be able to interpret them to people who don’t understand them. I think that's the real task ahead of us for baristas – baristas are in this learning mode a lot, and we’ve got this curiosity phase. What we need to do is also switch to a dispersal phase: stop absorbing and start spreading that information.”

At the other end of the coffee chain, “We’re also at this cross-roads in coffee in terms of our supply. We’re growing, but the coffee supply isn’t growing, it’s shrinking—largely because of climate change and soil weakness—and we’ve got to get motivated and active to fight those things. To fight climate change, we have a weapon, because we’re in coffee, we’re in the agriculture business, and agriculture can help fight climate change. We also need to lead – we’re a carbon user, and as an industry we can reverse that, and we can lead other industries in doing that.”

“These are some big things, but we’ve done big things before. So that’s what’s happening now, and it’s unclear at the moment how it’s going to sort out. All these things are out there but we haven’t grabbed onto a thing. I reckon within the next 12 or 18 months, that thing is going to emerge, and we’ll be able to rally around it again. Sort of how we rallied around barista competitions for the last decade, that was huge… that linked most of the baristas that are here. You and me are somehow linked in that way, and it’s all connected and it’s a language that we speak – when we say that we’re going to serve competition level drinks at this thing, all of us know what that means.”

“Something is going to emerge, I think, and it’s going to be the barista competition of the next decade.”



All photography and articles © Eileen P Kenny