Roasted in Seattle Coffee Tour

Explore Seattle's Coffee culture with this GPS guided audio walking tour featuring 20 locations with 27 minutes of audio on a 2-mile tour of the city's most notable coffee joints! Visit the first Starbucks and visit one of the many memorable coffee establishments. Get ready to get your coffee drink on!

Explore on location on a driving or walking tour, or from the comfort of your home! This limited version features 5 locations.

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Recently, the large Cascadian city of Seattle has become the hub of a new coffee industry. With the rise of Starbucks a “third wave” of coffee makers are defining the city's culture, and are expanding globally.

This third wave follows a model known to sociologists as a “third room” a place that is neither home nor work. In essence, the coffee shop culture evolved from French aristocratic establishment to a place where in all could “live” outside their homes and habits. For centuries coffee shops have been harbors for individuals, from students debating their studies, old friends meeting over hot chocolate, to the local who is always working on his novel – but never can seem to finish it.

Coffee has a long and brutal history, and its revival in the Northwest is another phase in the globalization of the crop. Popular among the Ethiopians coffee grew North into the Saudi peninsula when its Southernmost tip was under Ethiopian control. When control passed to the Ottoman Empire it was a major cash crop with popular demand throughout the Empire.

The Ottoman's protected was protected dearly. Coffee was smuggled out of the Empire on multiple occasions eventually landing it in the hands of the Austrians, French, Dutch, and Italians. Coffee did extend to England, but after the conquest of India it was replaced with tea.

Though the coffee house was common for the wealthy everywhere, it was the Austrians (neighbors to the Ottoman controlled Balkans) who created the first public coffee culture. In these establishments the works of many 18th and early 19th century artists and intellectuals flourished through their capacity to share ideas in an egalitarian setting.

However, the demand for coffee led to brutal practices. Entire peoples were often enslaved by the Dutch and French to produce coffee. Many slaves were beaten, raped, tortured, starved, and killed. In the early 1800s, a Dutch civil servant named Eduard Douwes Dekker worked on the Dutch colony Java, in modern Indonesia. In his policy changing semi-autobiographical novel Max Havelaar, he describes the cruelty of the coffee industry, corrupt officials, and brutal plantation owners. He wrote,

“Strangers came from the West who made themselves lords of his [the native's] land, forcing him to grow coffee for pathetic wages. Famine? In rich, fertile, blessed Java—famine? Yes, reader. Only a few years ago, whole districts died of starvation. Mothers offered their children for sale to obtain food. Mothers ate their children. He decried the plantation owner who "made his field fertile with the sweat of the labourer whom he had called away from his own field of labour. He withheld the wage from the worker, and fed himself on the food of the poor. He grew rich from the poverty of others."

It is for this reason modern coffee culture is sensitive to the practice of bean cultivation. With such history of violence it has been the goal of coffee shops in the Northwest to ensure the farmers of coffee receive reasonable prices for their labor and are not engaged in inhumane practices.


Keywords :
Seattle tour, seattle, walking tour, coffee tour