Fantastic Friday Links-January 14, 2011

A coffee shop in Split, Croatia is giving customers free use of an iPad instead of handing out free newspapers. link

The Columbian (Vancouver, WA) visited Paper Tiger Coffee on the same day I did. Look for my take on the café early next week. link

The people’s republic of Ukiah, California is trying to keep chains out of its downtown. Bad news for fans of Starbucks and Peet’s. link

More bad news about 2011 coffee production—this time from Indonesia. You’d better be prepared to pay more for that cup. There’s not much good news out there. link

Starbucks fans will be eager to get their hands on Howard Schulz’s new book, coming out in March. I’m sure it will detail how he saved the company. link

Things are heating up because the espresso machine cooled down in Aspen, Colorado, where a barista is being sued for turning off the machine on his last day of work. The coffee shop missed an hour of business the next morning, and the owners are mad. link

A judge ruled that Nespresso did not copy Silodesign’s double-walled glass design. link

You can see a picture of Silodesign’s cup and get a little more background on the story here.

Fox Business News says you can save $1,200 each year by eliminating coffee from your budget. link

One county commissioner from Cleveland wants to do just that. link

Happy Friday!

We've got a map.

It's taken a bit longer than it should have, but we've added a little more functionality to the Caffeinated PDX website. If you're looking for a good café in Portland, click on PDX Café Map, located on the right sidebar in the Cafe Reviews section, to see where you can find all of the cafés we've written about. The map has a link to each review so that you can quickly see if the café is what you're looking for. Hopefully you'll find one that's not too far away!

The Blue Kangaroo

As my friend Norman Bodek likes to say, life has a funny way of giving you gifts. Sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised by small things that happen. Your day might be brightened by a kind stranger, for example, as was the case for me when I went to Blue Kangaroo Coffee Roasters, located in the deep Southeast PDX neighborhood of Sellwood.

The Blue Kangaroo

The Blue Kangaroo café is a friendly place. It is fairly open, with several comfortable chairs and an area for the kids by one of the front windows. It would be a good place to take kids, or even better, it would be a good place to go after you dropped your kids off somewhere, say, at preschool. As you can see from the picture below, the café has its own splash of PDX weird—a flying pink pig hanging from the ceiling.

I didn't see any flying kangaroos

Flo, the co-owner of the Blue Kangaroo, was working the bar the day I was in there, and she told me the story behind the Blue Kangaroo.

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Ristretto, the Sequel (Prequel)

In Hollywood, when a film does well, studios rush to produce another one in order to take advantage of the buzz from the first one. Lots of times they just throw something together and figure that you liked the first one enough that you will go see the second. The results are often bad flicks. Weekend at Bernie’s II is a good example of a terrible sequel. Dumb and Dumberer comes to mind too (though you could argue that it wasn’t much of a drop-off). The sequels to Blair Witch Project, Rocky, Police Academy and The Matrix all left something to be desired.

Not every sequel is bad, though, and sometimes they turn out to be as good or better than the originals. The Godfather II, Superman 2, Shrek 2 and The Dark Knight all were improvements on their predecessors.

The question I had was, if Ristretto’s William Cafe was a movie, what would the sequel be like? Would it be like The Empire Strikes Back (good) or would it be like Grease 2 (awful)?. To find out,  I visited Ristretto Beaumont the other day, dressed as Darth Vader (just kidding!).

To be technically accurate, the Beaumont store, located at the corner of Northeast 42^nd and Fremont, is the original Ristretto location. However, I had already gone to the Ristretto on North Williams Avenue, so the trip to Beaumont played the role of a sequel.

Ristretto part un

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Keep it Weird

Sometimes, Portland just makes you chuckle.Go Herbie go

First Links of 2011

Happy First Friday. Here are some links from this week:

Coffee hijacks plane! A plane had to make an emergency landing this week when the pilot spilled his coffee on his radio equipment, causing it to send out a hijack signal. Oops. link

Starbucks announced a logo change this week. They removed “Starbucks Coffee” from the logo. The move is supposed to help the company be recognized in non-English-speaking countries as well as expand into other products besides coffee. link

Apparently, at least one “marketing and branding expert” didn’t think it was such a good idea. I think he was just trying to drive traffic to his blog (success!) link

There’s a new app that helps you find the best coffee in San Francisco. If anyone is interested in developing one for Portland, let me know. I’d be interested in working on one with you. link

Snohomish County, Washington is pleased with the results of its new bikini barista regulations one year after it implemented them. link

Chile, on the other hand, has apparently not tried too hard to regulate them. link

A bit of planning advice for people considering opening a coffee shop. link

Starbucks and Kraft, still fighting. Couldn’t Howard Schultz and Irene Rosenfeld get together over a cup of coffee and figure things out?  link

Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson has a frank question about Parisian coffee in an article in the New York Times Magazine’s blog. I don’t think he’s too impressed. link

Unlike another person who tried to rob a Dutch Bros. coffee stand, Caitlin Marie Elsen got off easy, receiving six years in prison. link

With a wave of bad publicity in the last year, the Portland Police department might consider trying “coffee with the cops”. link

Heart Roasters

It is rough to live in a place where there is so much quality coffee available. After leaving the Spunky Monkey the other day, I walked around the corner to Heart, a two-minute walk over to Burnside and up a block. Heart opened in October 2009 and is owned by Wille Yli Luoma, a professional snowboarder from Finland who lives in Portland. The contrast between the two cafés was evident.

Heart

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