cupping/"Apple Computer of"

[Bethany K. Dumas]

Am I  the last person to have heard?

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EMERYVILLE, Calif. - Doug Welsh picked up the first of 12 glasses of
coffee. He noisily slurped a spoonful, savored it briefly, then
immediately spit it out.

Sales of beans make up 45 percent of the retail revenue at Peet's Coffee
and Tea, which is based in a brick warehouse in Emeryville, Calif., just
south of Berkeley. Mike Madden prepares to load beans into a roaster.
Mr. Welsh, the vice president for coffee at Peet's Coffee and Tea, a
regional coffee retailer with its home here in the San Francisco Bay Area,
was "cupping" - testing samples of beans recently shipped from the Nairobi
coffee auction.

Mr. Welsh readily concedes that most customers would never know the
difference. But buying what Peet's considers an inferior bean, he said,
"is not a road we want to go down."

In the Bay Area, Peet's has long been the Apple Computer of coffee,
serving a small but intense group of aficionados who are convinced that
the company's coffee is superior to that produced by the industry giant
from Seattle: Starbucks.
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See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/business/04coffee.html?

Bethany
Peet's aficionado