Cellar Door Coffee Roasters

Cellar Door Coffee Roasters is one of those places that has been on my radar for quite some time, ever since I wandered by on a sunny autumn day (yes, we do have sun in Portland once in a while). After watching the first day of the Northwest Regional Barista Championships in Tacoma, I decided to make visiting the café a higher priority. Cellar Door had two baristas competing at the contest, a sure sign that the café’s baristas care about their craft.

Cellar Door Coffee, located on the busy SE 11^th Avenue between Hawthorne and Division, has been in its current location for about three years. Jeremy Adams and Andrea Pastor, the owners, founded the company in 2007, roasting small batches of coffee in their garage and selling it at farmers markets. As their direct-to-customer business increased, the operation outgrew its original location.

Today the café takes up the lower floor of an old (Victorian?) house that has been remodeled. It is not large, but the space is comfortable. There are a handful of tables in front of the bar, a few seats along the front window and a back area that has some soft chairs and a few toys for kids. A small roaster sits by the front door that Adams uses to roast coffee samples for cupping. Large trucks occasionally roll by and give the café a gentle shake.

Cellar Door

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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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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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Albina Press (North PDX)

The show Portlandia has been in the news a lot lately (it will probably show up a few more times in Caffeinated PDX in the near future), and it would not surprise me if the show’s writers hung out at Albina Press while coming up with ideas for the show. Located a short walk north of the Mississippi district, Albina Press has a lot of Portland(ia) to offer you.

If you were to go online and read through the reviews of the café, you would find that it gets a lot of love (and plenty of hate) for being the best (or the most pretentious) café in Portland. People seem to think the world of it or they seem to detest it.  I don’t think you should believe too much of what you read on the internet (yes, I am aware of the irony of that statement) so I went to check it out for myself.

Albina Press in North Portland

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Coffeehouse Five-Fighting Portland Syndrome

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Stockholm syndrome is a condition where prisoners start to feel affection for their captors. It gets its name from a robbery that took place in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973. Upon their release after being held inside a Stockholm bank for six days, the hostages publicly defended the robbers’ actions, having established some sort of emotional connection with them.

In the Portland version of the syndrome, the rain is analogous to the bank robbers. After a while, you get used to it and may even start to like it. The other day, I was actually glad it was raining as I made my way over to Coffeehouse Five. I needed some good coffee to get my mind back in order.

CH5

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Paper Tiger Coffee (Vancouver, WA)

When you think of great coffee cities, Vancouver, Washington is probably not the first name that comes to mind for Portlanders. Snide PDX residents refer to Vancouver as “Vantucky” (apologies to my relatives in Louisville), implying that the city is somewhat less cultured than its southern neighbor. This is an unfair characterization, however. I live in Southeast Portland and I can assure you it is not more sophisticated than Vancouver.

Fans of Portland coffee can be a bit the same way. Portland has great coffee and it is tempting to look down on our neighbors. However, if you look around some, you can find good coffee outside Portland. You just have to work a little harder to find it.

One way to keep up on what’s going on around the city and in the suburbs is through social networking. Social networking tools like Twitter can be a great source of coffee information. I might never have found Paper Tiger Coffee Roasters in Vancouver, Washington, had they not been on Twitter. Their tweets made it sound like they were coffee enthusiasts, so I went to go see if their coffee was as interesting as their Twitter feed. It was.

(By the way, if you haven’t already done so, be sure to subscribe to my Twitter feed to keep up to date with what is going on at Caffeinated PDX. Click on the icon on the right sidebar).

The tiger roars

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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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