Courier Coffee Roasters

It is always a challenge for coffee companies to carve out their place in the market, and even more so in a town that has as many cafés and roasters as Portland has. Some companies distinguish themselves by offering a great café experience, some by freshly roasting coffee in their cafés and others stand out simply by being weird. Courier Coffee Roasters distinguishes itself in two ways: 1) it always has ultra-fresh coffee; and 2) it uses bicycles to deliver its coffee around the city.

Courier prides itself on providing freshly roasted coffee, freshly ground coffee and freshly brewed coffee every day. If you haven’t gotten the message yet (and we preach it a lot around here), freshness matters. Each day, Joel and Alex, Courier’s owners, roast the quantity of beans they think they will use that day (or perhaps in the next two days). It can be a grind (pun intended) to roast every day in small quantities, but if that is what it takes to provide people with the freshest coffee, they are willing to do it.

Courier Coffee, with bike out front

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February 11 Links

It's that time again. Here are some coffee highlights from the last week:

There’s “Portland Weird” and then there’s “Silicon Valley Weird”. When you go to this link, be sure to watch the video of the robot that visits a local coffee shop in Mountain View, California. It’s kind of cool—and kind of creepy. link

Smuckers is raising the price on Folgers coffee, the third price increase in the past year. Just one more reason to stop drinking Folgers. link

Growing middle classes around the world are bound to have a long-term effect on coffee prices, as consumers demand better quality. MarketWatch has a short article about the effect the expanding middle class in Brazil is having on coffee prices. link

Coffee won’t make you fat, but what you put into it, might. link

Oliver Strand of the NY Times admires the pour-over culture that the US has imported from Japan. link

Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz has joined the board of directors of Groupon, which is reportedly planning an IPO later this year. Is there half-priced coffee in the future at Starbucks? I doubt it. Hopefully the company will have better TV commercials. link

Speaking of Groupon, Colin Smith does not think the company should have rejected Google’s $6 billion takeover offer. He raises some good points. link

It might be possible to find some wicked good coffee in Boston after all. link

The BBC has a video report about how rising coffee prices should be good for India’s coffee growers. link

A coffee shop in New York City is taking the direct-trade model of coffee sourcing very seriously, only selling Rwandan coffees that it buys directly from farmers. link

A Winlock, Washington artist paints swirling figures rising from coffee cups in sepia tones. His paint? Coffee grounds mixed with water. And you thought you were obsessed with coffee. link

And finally, in time for Valentine’s day, an ode to “Timeless Coffee Love” from Portland Roasting Coffee’s blog. link

Lava Java (Ridgefield, WA)

On the way up to the Northwest Barista Championships in Tacoma, Brandon Arends and I left Portland about 7am, giving us time to stop for coffee somewhere. Brandon said he knew of a good place along the way, so we didn’t stop at one of the cafés in Portland before leaving town. About a half hour after leaving SE Portland, we pulled off of I-5 at exit 14 near Ridgefield, Washington in search of a morning wake-up.

Despite knowing that Brandon had high standards, I was still a little skeptical when he pulled into the parking lot of a small strip mall out in the middle of nowhere (check this map to see what I mean). There didn’t seem to be much of anything nearby—no houses (unless you count the RV park that you could see in the distance), a few stores and zero foot traffic. The lack of people made me wonder how a cafe so far away from anything could stay in business. My previous experiences with similar out-of-the-way shops have rarely been great, and have sometimes been disastrous, so I was less than enthusiastic.

A plain exterior, but. . .

As we parked in front of the Lava Java sign, Brandon told me that he knew the owner of the café, Phuong Tran. He also said that she won the 2005 US Barista Championships. Oh. That changed my perception of the café rather quickly.

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Tired of paper transit tickets? (updated)

Today, I want to step away from coffee for just a moment. One of my favorite things to talk about is entrepreneurship, and I have something I would like to share with you.

When I’m out traveling around the city, I prefer to walk or take public transportation. Walking around, you really get the feel of a place, and on the bus or the train, you don’t have to stress about traffic.

Since I take the bus and the train pretty regularly, I can say with confidence that it would be nice to be able to pay for tickets using an app on my phone, especially when riding the bus. Even better, the phone would serve as a ticket itself.

Tri-Met (Portland’s public transit agency) doesn’t have a system like that yet. However, a couple of my classmates from Portland State’s MIM program are trying change that. Nat Parker and Michael Gray have started a company called GlobeSherpa to develop mobile phone apps, and their most promising app at this time is called TransitSherpa, an app that acts as an electronic ticket management system for Tri-Met. I’ll let Nat explain:

Their company is currently in negotiations with Tri-Met to make the system a reality, but they need some funding to speed things up. Tomorrow evening, at 5:30pm, Nat and Michael will be at the Backspace café/pub competing in the second-to-last round of the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network’s Seed Oregon competition, a competition that helps start-up companies with funding and guidance. The winner is determined by popular vote of the audience, so the more supporters TransitSherpa has, the better chance it has to win. The winning company gets to present at the Angel Oregon conference in March, where it could acquire the funding it is looking for.

If you think that a Tri-Met ticket app is something that you would rather have sooner than later, come by Backspace tomorrow evening at 5:30 and support TransitSherpa. It costs $25, which I know is kind of steep, but it’s supposed to include some kind of food and drink spread. In addition, Nat has promised me that he’s going to be especially entertaining during his presentation.

You might wonder if I get anything out of this advertisement for them. Nope. I’m just spreading the word for them and trying to speed up the process of creating a Tri-Met ticket app. It’s 2011, and the time for e-tickets is here. Let’s help TransitSherpa make it happen.

No más

Update: GlobeSherpa won by two votes! Congratulations and good luck at the next round.

Freshness, grind, and making due with old equipment

If you’re like me, you might not have the best-quality tools for making coffee, so you have to do the best you can with what you’ve got. Fortunately, there are coffee experts among us who can help us do just that. The other day, Matt and Liam from the Stumptown Annex gave me some good coffee advice that I wanted to pass along to you.

I went to the Annex to buy some coffee to brew at home, and since I was buying good (and somewhat pricy) beans, I wanted make sure the beans were prepared properly. I have a very poor-quality blade grinder, so the question was: would be better to have them grind the coffee to the correct size, or should I take the beans home and grind them myself as needed? As you know, freshness is one of the most important factors that determines the taste of the coffee, but the grind is important too. Where was the trade-off between bean freshness and an accurate grind? The two coffee experts cleared things up.

They told me that since I was using a French press, it would probably be better to grind the beans myself at home. With some brewing methods, having an even grind is of paramount importance. However, of all the brewing methods, the French press method is the most forgiving, and you can get away with some variation in the size of the grounds. If they were to grind the beans, many of the aromatics that give the coffee its richness would soon be gone. Therefore, they reasoned, freshness was more important and I should grind them myself at home. Sounded like solid advice to me.

The two also gave me some advice on how to make the most of my rickety grinder (if you have a good burr grinder, you can disregard this). They were confident that I could still grind the beans well for the French press if I used a couple tricks.

First, in order to get the best grind possible, don’t just set the grinder on the counter and turn it on. As you grind the coffee, shake the grinder up and down in order to keep the coffee stirred up. That way you will not end up with lots of finely-ground coffee at the bottom and coarsely ground coffee at the top.

You should also pulse the grinder so that it does not continually run while you are grinding the beans. Pulsing will reduce the heat generated by the blades. You don’t want the grounds to heat up because the flavor compounds literally vaporize at higher temperatures, leaving you with a somewhat flat coffee.

To help me gauge the right size, Matt sent me home with a sample of coffee ground with their commercial grinder, allowing me to compare my grind to the proper grind. This is something I recommend you do too if you are using a blade grinder. The baristas at your favorite café should be happy to grind some beans to the proper size for you to use as a guide.

By following these tips, you might not brew the best pot of coffee you have ever had, but you will definitely make the most of your brewing equipment.

Good coffee is even possible with this. . . an antique from the 90s

Happy grinding and enjoy your fresh-ground coffee. 

We have a winner

The mystery café contest has come and gone. Congratulations to Vinnie Kinsella for figuring out that the café was Lents Commons, located at the corner of 92^nd and Foster in SE Portland (review coming one of these days). As promised, Vinnie is going to receive a bag of fresh Portland coffee. He figured out that the café from the clues I sent out on Twitter (are you following Caffeinated PDX on Twitter yet?). 

The coffee prize this time is from Cellar Door, a roaster in inner SE PDX. Thomas Suprenant, a barista at Cellar Door who competed in the NWRBC, helped me select it. He chose a Costa Rica ‘Esquipulas’, a coffee that has been honey-processed, which means that a very specific amount of the fruit is left on the bean when it dries, adding a bit of sweetness and flavor to the finished beans. The coffee is described as having a “rich medium body, sweet lemon & honey hard-candy clarity.” It was roasted this morning, so it is fresh.

Waiting for the French press

Vinnie is a freelance writer, book editor, poet and wordsmith who also teaches in the Master’s of Book Publishing program at Portland State University (Go Vikings!). He is also a coffee shop enthusiast and regular reader of Caffeinated PDX. You can check out his website at http://vinniekinsella.com. Again, congratulations to Vinnie and thanks for reading!

Friday's Links February 4

In Washington, apart from trying to figure out the state’s upcoming budget deficit, legislators are discussing whether coffee should be the state’s official beverage. link

Starbucks is offering a guarantee for its Via instant coffee line. If you’re not satisfied, take it back to the store for a free 12oz bag of ground whole-bean coffee. link

Bad news for men who like coffee. Researchers at the University of Bristol (England) found that drinking coffee hurts men’s performance under stress. Women, on the other hand, performed better after drinking coffee. link

It looks like Lavazza is going to fight it out with Starbucks for the Indian coffee market. link

Andrew Stark, management professor at the University of Toronto, discusses some of the benefits and criticisms of the fair trade movement, in a book review of The Fair Trade Revolution. link

More competition for the China coffee market. True Coffee, a Thai company, plans to try its hand at the market by opening 15 cafés in Shanghai this year. link

Rose Tosti from Seattle weekly has a full-weekend round-up from the 2011 NW Regional Barista Championship. link

The engineering firm Bechtel is supporting the Washington State University College of Engineering and Architecture by donating a year-long supply of free coffee for the students’ study area.  link

On a related note, perhaps someone should supply the WSU basketball team with some coffee. link

Come on Cougs, you’re better than that.