The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf: how LA's 1963 coffee pioneer predates Peet's and Starbucks

The standard origin story of American specialty coffee runs through the Bay Area and Seattle: Alfred Peet opens in Berkeley in 1966, his protégés open Starbucks in Seattle’s Pike Place in 1971, and from there the whole better-coffee movement unspools. It is a tidy story, and it leaves out the company that got there first — a Los Angeles business that started in 1963, three years before Peet’s, eight before Starbucks, and that arguably remains the oldest specialty coffee and tea retail chain in the United States ^[1][2][3]. Most of Los Angeles has forgotten it had a head start.

Herbert Hyman, 1963

The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf was founded in September 1963 by Herbert B. Hyman ^[1][2]. It did not begin as a café. Hyman started it as an office coffee-delivery service — fresh-roasted beans and equipment supplied to Los Angeles workplaces — which is to say he was selling the idea of good coffee to a city that mostly drank percolated supermarket grind ^[2]. The first retail store opened in 1968, on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood ^[1][2]. That storefront is the thing that matters: it is, by date, one of the very first specialty coffee shops in the country, and it predates the West Coast roasters who usually get the founding credit.

What was actually new

Plenty of places sold coffee in 1963. What made The Coffee Bean different is what it did at the counter:

• Beans labeled by country of origin. This sounds obvious now — Colombian, Kenyan, Costa Rican, Sumatran, each in its own bin. In the early 1960s it was close to radical. Hyman’s stores treated coffee the way wine shops treated wine: as an agricultural product with a place of origin, not a generic brown commodity ^[2].
• In-store roasting demonstrations. The shop showed customers the roast — the green beans going in, the smell, the color change — making the production of the coffee part of the retail experience rather than something hidden in a factory ^[2].
• Free sampling before you buy. You could taste a coffee before committing to a bag of it. That, too, was an unusual courtesy at the time, and it built a customer base that learned to tell one origin from another ^[2].

Put those three together and you have, in 1963–68 Los Angeles, the basic template that “specialty coffee” would later claim as its own: single-origin sourcing, transparency about roasting, and an educated customer. Hyman was running it on San Vicente before Peet’s existed.

And there’s the tea

The name is not decoration. From the start, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf carried loose-leaf teas alongside the coffee, sold the same way — by type and origin, with the leaf visible and samplable. That dual identity, coffee bar and tea merchant in one, was unusual then and is still part of what distinguishes the chain from the pure-coffee houses that came after ^[1].

The Ice Blended, Westwood, 1987

There is a second Los Angeles invention buried in the company’s history. In 1987, at the Westwood store near UCLA, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf created the Ice Blended — coffee (or, later, tea, vanilla, and other flavors), ice, and a powder base spun together into a thick frozen drink ^[3]. It predates Starbucks’ Frappuccino, which arrived in the mid-1990s, and it is still the chain’s signature. The blended-coffee drink that is now a global café standard was, like the chain itself, an LA original.

Where it sits in coffee history

Coffee historians like to talk in “waves”: first wave, the mass-market canned-and-instant era; second wave, the espresso-bar boom built around Starbucks; third wave, the artisan single-origin movement of roasters like Intelligentsia, which planted its Los Angeles flag around 2007. By that scheme, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf is usually filed as “second wave” — and it is, in the sense that it grew into a large mall-and-airport chain. But the company’s origins are something stranger and more interesting: a 1963 Los Angeles business doing single-origin labeling, visible roasting, and pre-purchase tasting — the things third-wave shops would later present as a break from the past. It was, in effect, a proto-second-wave that already had third-wave instincts, decades early, and LA forgets it had it ^[1][2][3].

Why this is an LA story

The next time someone narrates American coffee as a line from Berkeley to Seattle, the Los Angeles correction is simple: the oldest specialty coffee and tea retail chain in the country opened here, the year before Peet’s, and it brought single-origin beans and in-store roasting to a city of percolators; and the blended iced-coffee drink that the rest of the world copied was invented at its Westwood store in 1987. Herbert Hyman’s chain went everywhere — but it started on San Vicente Boulevard ^[1][2][3].