In today's hard-hitting business news: the East Coast expansion of Peet's Coffee and Tea has not gone exactly as planned, it seems. East Coast coffee drinkers, with their delicate palates refined through years of drinking medium roast joe from Dunkin' Donuts, don't have quite the same taste for Alfred Peet's signature burn-the-crap-out-of-it dark roast that West Coast chain-drinkers are so fond of. As a senior marketing manager for Peet's told the Wall Street Journal, beans from the Emeryville-based roaster "just didn't have the taste profile [East Coasters] were looking for."

All of the chain's current East Coast stores are located in Massachusetts, where getting Dunkin' Donuts coffee is a pastime only slightly less popular than drinking Sam Adams' "microbrews", punching fellow Bostonians in the teeth and being excited about Mitt Romney. So, to win over all those pastry-dipping, tooth-punching coffee drinkers, Peet's is introducing a lighter medium roast bean to their usual assortment. The more nuanced roast was actually introduced to grocery store shelves back in August, but it has yet to make it's way through the grinders at retail locations.

Alfred Peet, patriarch of many a Peetnik, was responsible for supplying the founders of Starbucks with their beans for many of that company's formative years, which might explain why they both taste mostly burnt at this point. Anyway, no self-respecting, caffeine-craving San Franciscan would be caught dead at a megachain coffee store at this point — Not unless the line at the nearest fourth-wave roastery was too long, anyway.

[WSJ]