Peet's Coffee & Tea

I live in San Diego, and one of my favorite places to go for freshly brewed, loose-leaf tea is Peet's Coffee & Tea. Peet's has multiple store locations in the major coastal cities of California, Oregon, and Washington.

Starbucks only has Tazo tea in bags, and their personnel rarely have any knowledge about their stock. Peet's, however, has a variety of loose-leaf teas, and their personnel actually know something about their varieties, including the proper water temperature and time for steeping each variety.

Peet's website (www.peets.com) offers a variety of teas, samplers, and accessories for brewing and serving for sale, including a "tea tour" that offers a monthly sampling of tea varieties sent directly to your home. The site also offers a map of store locations. They also have a "Learning" area of their website that offers information about how tea is grown processed, and graded. It's nice that they have recognized that some "Peetniks" are tea drinkers, not coffee people.

Peet's is definitely a cut about most coffee shops that "also" offer tea. In a future post I'll discuss some "tea only" shops that cater to tea snobs and connoisseurs.