The obit on Alfred Peet at the Peet's Coffee website isn't bad. Certainly more accurate than the many others I read.
Trouble is, I talked to Alfred on several occasions over more than a decade and his story was very different from the modern obit.
Alfred told me that he went to Java as a tea buyer and tea exporter. Coffee, with its two species and ten growing countries at the time was insignificant to him compared to tea with 25 species and 40 countries of origin. Coffee was to tea, like tennis shoes are to leather for a cobbler.
When Alfred opened his first shop in Berkeley it was to sell tea but he quickly found the customers wanted coffee.
Long after he had sold the S.F. Bay Area name Peet's to the current corporation, Alfred was still on the payroll as a consultant...not for coffee buying but for tea.