Slamming espressos, Seattle style

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I was passing through Seattle yesterday and had a couple hours to kill, so over a span of two hours, I did my own mini coffee crawl, hitting three different cafés.

For the record, I really like Seattle. It seems quite a bit larger than Portland, in a good way. The city is so hilly that from lots of the intersections downtown you can see out across Puget Sound and over to the Olympic Peninsula. These views make Seattle seem more open than it otherwise might be.

The first stop of my coffee junket was at Cherry Street Coffee House. Cherry Street has several different cafes in Seattle, but the one I visited was actually on Cherry Street (the original, perhaps?).

Cherry Street Coffee House

One of the reasons that I went to Cherry Street was that I had read that the café’s coffee was roasted by Dillano’s, Roast Magazine’s 2010 Roaster of the Year.  I ordered an espresso and went to sit down.

The café itself has two levels. The coffee bar is at street level, and the seating is down a set of stairs, where the café spreads out under the store next door. It reminded me of an old speakeasy, one of those secret places where people could gather discretely to buck the rules of Prohibition during the 1920s and 1930s.

On one wall, rather, in one wall, a walk-in safe serves as the café’s office, and toward the back of the seating area, a faux fireplace is painted onto the wall. Two old, bright red stuffed chairs sit in front of the fire, welcoming you to sit down. With no windows in the seating area, the café is a bit dark, but it suffices as a place to work and drink coffee.

The espresso was made from the Cherry Street House Blend, and is unique to Cherry Street cafés. The barista told me that it was a medium roast, but if that’s the case, I have to question my understanding of what a medium roast is. The coffee in my cup had a nice thick crema that stuck to the sides of the cup, and the first sip or two, I tasted some strong almond flavors and fittingly enough, cherries. After the nice beginning though, all hints of sweetness and subtleties disappeared off and what was left was very smoky. Perhaps I’m just being oversensitive, but I was disappointed how it finished.

After finishing the espresso, I headed up the street toward Pike Place Market and my favorite store in Seattle, DeLaurenti. DeLaurenti is an Italian food import shop, and it seems like anytime I visit the city, I am drawn to the shelves full of Italian tomatoes, meats, cheeses, olives, pastas and wines. I can spend hours in that store, concocting recipes in my mind and dreaming about getting on a plane to fly to the Mediterranean. If I was going to get some more coffee, though, there was no time to linger, so I grabbed a sandwich and left quickly, to avoid falling prey to the temptations residing deeper within the store.

A must-visit

Originally, I had hoped to go to Stella Caffè for some espresso (I had been thinking about it since my trip to Coffee Fest last October), but to my chagrin, the café that was rumored to have the best Robusta-based espresso in the city is no longer a café. I don’t know the story, but when I called to see what time they closed down the espresso bar, the woman on the other end informed me that they were now a bar and not a café. Foiled again. If anyone knows where I can get some of Stella’s stellar espresso, please let me know.

Instead of going to Stella, I walked up Pike Street to Seattle Coffee Works. Seattle Coffee Works is a small roastery/café located right across the street from the first Starbucks store. The café has a slow coffee bar on one side, with pourovers and vacuum pots, and on the other side it has an espresso bar. I chose the espresso side (surprise, surprise). The barista told me that although they usually had a single-origin espresso available, they had just run out of the Panama and were down to the Space blend, the café’s signature espresso. My impression was that it was just a bit on the tart side, but overall, much better than the espresso I had drunk a few minutes before.

Seattle Coffee Works

After downing the Space blend, I was feeling up for one more stop. Someone told me that Fonté was a nearby place that was doing good things, and since it was located between Seattle Coffee Works and the train station, it would be  a great place to stop for the third leg of my trifecta.

About five minutes later, I was seated at a table at Fonté, waiting for my cappuccino.

Fonté Coffee and Wine Bar

Fonté has a pretty hip feel to it (like most places I regularly frequent*). In addition to being a coffee shop, it also doubles as a wine bar. It looked like  a great place to spend a happy hour, so I was looking forward to my cappuccino.

Chic

The foam on the cappuccino had a nice texture, but the espresso was roasted so dark that it completely overpowered the milk. A cappuccino should be balanced—both the milk and the coffee flavors should come through. In this cappuccino, though, you could not taste any of the natural sweetness of the steamed milk. The coffee dominated. It was too much for me.

Visiting two cafés (out of three) that had super dark roast espressos left me disappointed but wondering, is this type of roast just the traditional “Seattle style?” Perhaps this is due to the influence of Starbucks in the city? Starbucks has a reputation for serving dark-roasted espresso, but its espresso doesn’t have as much of the smokiness as the espressos at Cherry Street, Fonté or Caffè d’Arte (another Seattle-based roaster whose espresso I have had in the past).

Do I have the wrong expectations for what espresso ought to taste like? After all, I live in Portland, where lighter roasts are the norm. Should I learn to appreciate this dark roast for what it is, instead of thinking it should taste like something else, or are the beans being treated without the care they deserve? After yesterday, these questions linger in my mind. . . I would be very interested to hear what someone from Seattle has to say about this.

Here are a couple more pictures of things I saw during my visit:

Century Link Field just won't sound the same

One of the stops I made was at Qwest (soon to be Century Link) Field, which is right next to the Amtrak station in South Seattle. It’s a nice looking stadium and it was humbling to walk right up next to the behemoth and look down on the field inside. I don’t know what it is about being up next to huge objects, but they make you feel small, especially when you’re not in a crowd of people. A stadium like that is a testament to human ingenuity. It doesn’t compare to standing next to Mt. Rainier, but I was still impressed.

A closer look

The city skyline, seen from the steps of the stadium.

The Starbucks mother ship (corporate headquarters). I like the sirens rising out of the tower on top.

This statue was outside the Seattle Art Museum. One of these times I’m going to make it inside to see what treasures reside there.

Overall, I enjoyed my trip to the Emerald City, and would have been content to stay for a little longer (there are several more cafés I want to check out). The train wouldn’t wait for me, though, so at 5:30 sharp, we pulled out of the station and headed south. Until next time, Seattle.

*sarcasm alert

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Coffee(ish) Links for July8

It’s been a slow week around here for posting articles. I have had my head buried in a couple other projects, including learning everything I can about cold coffee, a summertime favorite.

Speaking of summer, it came and left this week. Hope you enjoyed it.

The biggest coffee news of the week in the Portland area was the fireworks-caused fire that caused thousands of dollars of damage to Barista (the café) on Alberta Street. http://bit.ly/pnjMNB The fire didn’t keep the shop closed for long, thanks to Stumptown, who loaned Barista its mobile coffee cart until the café is repaired (photo here).

This New York Times article discusses the growing market for iced coffee. Stumptown gets a mention for its new “stubbies”. http://nyti.ms/nYo8Dy

Investors in the stock market know the difficulties of trying to pick the correct companies for investing. An article from CNBC yesterday presents the arguments for and against buying Starbucks stock. One of the analysts interviewed was quoted as saying that “Starbucks needs to clearly define their long-term vision ‘to become a food conglomerate rather than merely coffee.’” Hmm... http://bit.ly/pbyihq

Is the use of the internet for news taking us back in time? The Economist compares interactive online news with the coffee shops of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. http://econ.st/pLH1Bc

When you go to a coffee shop, do you notice the art on the walls? Apparently, some coffee shop art in San Francisco has stirred quite a debate over what should and should not go up on the walls of a café. http://bit.ly/p2MZAA

Speaking of coffee shop art, I saw this not too long ago on a café wall around town. Rubber chicken art.

Let the debate commence.

How do you like your iced coffee?

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It’s summertime (finally, if you live in Portland) and it is hot outside (unless you live in Portland, where it’s pleasantly warm), which means that you might be looking for a little change from the hot coffee routine. Iced coffee is a particularly hot (cold?) commodity this time of the year, and few things are more refreshing than drinking a tall, cool glass while sitting in the shade.

When you look for iced coffee, you have several options. You can buy (or make) an iced espresso drink (Americano, latte, etc.), an iced toddy* (coffee brewed at room temperature for long periods of time then poured over ice) and the traditional iced coffee (hot-brewed coffee that is quickly cooled or brewed directly over ice). Among iced coffee drinkers, there is some debate about which method makes the best cold coffee.

My favorite of the three is the iced toddy. The slow, low-temperature brewing process leaves out much of the acidity that you would find in hot-brewed coffee, making the toddy very smooth and easy to drink. The resulting beverage has a liqueur-like mouth feel, and tends to taste more chocolaty than fruity.

Not everyone thinks so highly of the toddy. I was talking with a friend today about coffee and he said that for him, the toddy is overrated. He believes that coffee needs to have the acidity, because a lot of the coffee’s flavor comes from “the acidity moving across your palate.”  Without these flavors, the coffee is flat. I countered that both are enjoyable, as long as you expect each one to be a different experience.

Since it is iced coffee season and I am curious about these kinds of things, I have two questions for you:

1. What kind of iced coffee beverages do you drink?

2. If you make it at home, how do you do it?

*The term toddy comes from the name of the person, Todd Simpson, who popularized the cold-brew method with a patented brewing system in the 1960s.

From nuts to fruits: learning how to taste at Ristretto Roasters

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Last weekend, after stopping by Overland Park to listen to Leaves Russell perform at the Organic Brewers Festival, I made my way over to Ristretto Roasters café on North Williams Ave., to have some coffee with Jinsu Lee, a South Korean coffee aficionado who has also explored many different cafés around Portland (he provided the photos for this post). We like to get together once in a while to talk about coffee and what the future of the coffee industry might be, especially in South Korea, where specialty coffee is just beginning to take off.

When I got to the café, Jinsu was already sitting at a back table with a group of people.  He waved me over and introduced me to the group—Ryan, Rachel, Hank and Steve (all Ristretto employees) and told me that they had invited us to join them. Unknowingly, we had stumbled upon Ristretto’s weekly Sunday public coffee event.

Each Sunday afternoon at 2:30, Ristretto hosts some kind of event to help educate customers about coffee. Often these are coffee cuppings, but last Sunday’s was a little different. Instead of tasting different coffees, the plan was to taste several different foods as a way to develop and map out our palates. Steve, who is a trainer for Ristretto, led us through the exercise.

Preparing to taste. Photo courtesy Jinsu Lee

Developing a discerning palate is very important for people who work in the coffee industry (especially for coffee buyers and roasters), who need to be sure that they are producing a consistent, high-quality product. It is a skill that takes time to develop. I once heard a café owner tell a group that he and his business partner cupped coffee every single morning for three years. As you can imagine, he felt pretty confident in his ability to detect all of the subtleties and imperfections that are present in a cup of coffee.

If you have read many of my café posts, you know that I try to describe the flavors in each of the coffees. I have mentioned several times that a coffee has hints of berries in it, or some kind of citrus, chocolate or cherries. Two of the more interesting coffees I tried to describe came from Ristretto’s cafés (you can read them here and here). On coffee packages and in conversations with baristas, flavors like dates, honey, leather, tamarind, bergamot, carrots, plums and peaches have also been used. All of these descriptions are somewhat subjective, since we all taste things differently.

A more experienced coffee taster uses less subjective language and describes coffee in terms like acidity, body, sweetness and balance, breaking the coffee down into the responses they cause in our mouth.

The tasting lineup. Photo courtesy Jinsu Lee

Steve’s goal was to teach us to think about tasting in a more methodical way. As we tasted the foods, our assignment was to concentrate on how they felt and where they affected our mouths, tongues and throats. We tasted 10 different foods: almonds, hazelnuts, Brazil nuts, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, avocados, red delicious apples, Granny Smith apples, lemons and limes.

We started out with the least acidic food, the almonds, and then moved step by step toward the most acidic, the limes. Apparently, if you were to start with the limes, the acidity would overload your palate at the beginning and make it much harder to taste the other foods.

Of the three nuts, the almonds were the driest. They were a little bit sweet, affecting the front end of my tongue as I ground them up between my teeth (Speaking of grinding up the almonds, it was kind of amusing to sit there and watch everyone working the foods around their mouths, their faces reflecting a deep concentration as they tried discern all of the tastes and textures. I’m sure I had a funny look on my face too).

The hazelnuts were distinctly sweeter and had more oils in them than the almonds. The Brazil nuts had a little bit of a sandy (mineral) flavor, and were the oiliest of all, leaving a light coating on the inside of my mouth. Steve told us that the difference between the Brazil nuts and the almonds was analogous to the difference between coffees with a lot of body and those without it.

We discussed body some more as we moved into the chocolates. We started with the milk chocolate, which was very sweet and creamy. It had lots of body. The dark chocolate, in contrast, was only a little bit sweet, and it dried out my mouth as I chewed it. Our guide told us that the drying effect came from the tannins in the cocoa. He said it was like a dry wine, where the wine is fermented with the skins still on the grapes. This leaves more of the tannins in the wine, giving the wine that mouth-drying feel.

After the dark chocolate came the avocado. The avocado was another demonstration of something with a lot of body. The oils in the avocado coated our mouths as we swished the slimy fruit around inside them.

The two apples followed the avocado. This was the beginning of the acidity phase of the tasting. The light acidity of the red delicious apple is similar to (though sweeter than) some of the berry or stone fruit acidity that some coffees have. It stays more towards the front of your tongue. The Granny Smith apples are a bit more tart, so as soon as you chew them up, the acidity moves up the sides of your tongue.

When we got to the lemons, everyone prepared to pucker up. We bit enthusiastically into the chunks of raw lemon and WHAM! Faces around the table tightened up as the lemon juice hit our taste buds. The lime had a similar affect. Its acidity grabbed the middle of my tongue, then as I swallowed, it latched onto the back of my throat and lingered. The lime was so acidic that it kind of burned and almost tasted salty. Jinsu quipped that we could have used some tequila to go with it, a statement that was greeted with a nod of agreement from everyone.

After we finished tasting, we sat around for a while and talked about coffee, because that’s what coffee people do when they get together, especially after going through a tasting exercise like this one. We concluded that Portland is a great city to learn about coffee, because cafés like Ristretto are always trying to educate their customers on the finer points of the beverage.

If you are looking for something to do on a Sunday afternoon, I recommend that you stop by Ristretto and check out what they are sharing that day. You might get to try or taste something you’ve never had before, or you might just get to hang around with a bunch of coffee enthusiasts. Either way, you should have a good afternoon at one of Portland’s best cafés.

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#Trust30 Day 32 - Fault and Change

I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think of all the things that are not working in your life. That job you don’t like, that relationship that’s not working, those friends that annoy you. Now turn them all on you. Imagine that everything that’s not working in your life, is your fault. How would you approach it? What would you work on to change your life to the state that you want it to be? –Carlos Miceli

If everything not working in my life were my fault, what would I do?

I would sit down and brainstorm how the hell I’m going to get things turned around. I would start by writing down a list of everything I thought was going wrong. From there, I would prioritize the list and decide which ones I should start working on first.

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I Miss the Mob - a lesson in entrepreneurship

The cover of Anything You Want, Derek Sivers' new bookTweet

Today I came across a video that I thought you might enjoy. To give you a little background, Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, has just written a new book about entrepreneurship that is being published by the Domino Project. CD Baby is a company that helps independent musicians manage their music sales. Anyone can upload their songs to the company’s servers, and CD Baby will managed the distribution of that music, either as a CD or as a digital download. Sivers founded the company in 1997, and it became very successful, selling millions of albums.  He sold the company a couple years ago and has since moved on to start new ventures to help more aspiring musicians.

I hope to read his book sometime, but today I wanted to share with you a video that he put on the site promoting his book. It has a pretty funny take on the differences between entrepreneurs who are in business because they love what they do and professional businesspeople who are only in business to make money.

The video is relevant to Portland, a city that has not yet lost its fun spirit. In my discussions with roasters, baristas and café owners, many of them have told me that while making money is important to them, they are happy to be doing something that they enjoy.

Thanks to all who realize that there is more to business than just dollars and cents. You help keep Portland interesting. 

#Trust30 Day 31 - Image

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mess up your hair. If you are wearing makeup – smudge it. If you have a pair of pants that dont really fit you – put them on. Put on a top that doesn’t go with those pants. Go to your sock drawer. Pull out two socks that don’t match. Different lengths, materials, colors, elasticity.

Now two shoes. You know the drill.

Need to add more? Ties? Hair clips? Stick your gut out? I trust you to go further.

Take a picture.

Get ready to post it online.

Are you feeling dread? Excitement? Is this not the image you have of yourself? Write about the fear or the thrill that this raises in you? Who do you need to look good for and what story does it tell about you? Or why don’t you care? -Matthew Stillman

[I thought yesterday’s #Trust30 post was the last one of its kind, but now I wouldn’t be surprised to find another one in the inbox tomorrow. This might be my last one, regardless.]

Doing outrageous things to draw attention to myself, such as dressing up like a madman and posting a picture on the internet is something that I tend to avoid, probably because I like to be thought of as serious. At least that’s the image I tend to portray (I have a hidden comedian side too, but it doesn’t come out all that often). Besides, dressing up weird and posting a funny picture on the internet would make me a lot less nervous than posting a link to this*. Dressing up is much less personal to me than letting people hear me sing, especially when I can tell that I was holding something back (I do like the guitar part on the song. It took me a while to come up with all those licks).

Anyway, I understand the need to do things outside my comfort zone. I can’t remember who said it (my guess is Seth Godin), but it is good to “do something outrageous once in a while just to show yourself that you can.” It pushes you out of your comfort zone and helps you overcome your fear of looking ridiculous, a real fear that many of us have. People are often well-rewarded when they can overcome this (Lady GaGa is an example that comes to mind), so the advice is something I should follow more often.

I’m working on it.

*The HFC Theme Song was written and recorded in Boston in 2005. Thanks to @TimDowning for the help, and to all those who contributed photos (mostly my mother).