Fleeting flavors of the fall

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When it comes to coffee, one of the best ways to train your taster is to drink different coffees side-by-side or in rapid succession. Today, I did just that at Coffeehouse Northwest. I tried two different espressos (the famous “flight” that I have mentioned in the past) within a couple minutes of each other.

The first was a single-origin espresso from Yemen. The enthusiastic barista described it as being full of fall fruits—dates, apricots, pears, etc. My initial impression was that it was a bit earthy (one of my favorite ways to describe “earthiness” is that it is like “leaves in the fall,” especially at this time of year. Imagine the aroma of the leaves as they fall from the trees). The coffee was slightly sweet with a thick, full crema that was just a touch “rough” (the foam had a coarser texture than some cremas do). It had a pleasant aftertaste that lingered. The espresso was excellent.

The second espresso, from Nicaragua, was a very different experience. It had a sweet aroma, and if you tried it, you might get the impression that someone had slipped some raspberries into the cup before filling it with coffee. It had twice the tartness of the first one, tingling more on the tongue and then finishing more cleanly.

When you taste two different coffees in this manner, in addition to improving your ability to detect the differences between the origins, it also helps you understand what you like and what you don’t like. In this case, the second shot was good, but the first one was special. I will keep my eyes open for Yemeni coffee in the future.

Whether you spread a flight out over a couple hours to avoid a big caffeine hit, or drink the coffees one after another to closely compare them, you can build your coffee knowledge and appreciation by taking advantage of one of the better deals in Portland ($4/two shots). It is an affordable approach to improving your coffee conversation capabilities.

[Side note: Autumn has arrived, and with it, apparently, a lot of alliteration.]

The Sounds of PDX Coffee

If you need a break from reading about Portland coffee, today I am sharing with you a link to a site where you can listen about coffee. A couple weeks ago I met Evan Tenenbaum, an independent audio producer who is producing a weekly series of short audio documentaries about the city of Portland. His site is called Organic City Sounds, and last week’s topic was coffee. Evan wanted to get the perspective of an enthusiastic coffee drinker/writer as part of his production, so he asked if we could sit down for a few minutes and talk about coffee.

We met at Coava, on SE Grand, where the crew behind the bar was the dynamic duo of Sam Purvis, the 2010 Northwest Regional Barista Champion, and Devin Chapman, the 2010 Northwest Regional Pourover Champion. As you can imagine, the coffee was good. Unfortunately, the café was a bit noisy for doing the actual interview, so instead of hanging around and drinking more coffee, we headed to a nearby park to finish our conversation.

Here’s the link:

http://www.organiccitysounds.com/2011/09/portland-portrait-coffee/

In the seven-minute clip you can also hear Aleco Chigounis, chief coffee buyer for Stumptown Coffee, and Matt Milletto, VP of the American Barista & Coffee School and co-owner of Water Avenue Coffee, give their perspectives on what makes Portland coffee special.

I encourage you to check out the coffee piece as well as some of the other sounds of the city that Evan has collected and put together for you.

Coffee Links for the Week September 26, 2011

Lots about Starbucks today…When you are the world’s biggest coffee company, you’re going to make news.

A Starbucks employee got fired recently after making a video of himself singing about his day at work. Oops. For anyone who has worked as a barista (especially for the big green apron), or any other service industry, there is enough truth in the song to be funny (warning: contains family-unfriendly language). link

Can we just go ahead and label coffee a superbeverage? A study now shows that the drink helps older female smokers avoid depression (but what about younger male non-smokers?) link

To celebrate its 40^th anniversary, Starbucks has released a t-shirt with a coffee-stain design that costs $85. Anyone running out to get one? link

A car running on coffee grounds recently set a speed record, reaching 77.5 mph. Looking at the pictures, is that a flux capacitor they’ve got in there? link

Coffee + hard alcohol = Four Loko for the upper class. link

National Coffee Day is coming September 29^th. Krispy Kreme is giving away free coffee. link

There are some sick people out there. No question about it. I would be mad as hell if this happened to someone in my family too, and I hope that they nail the sick sonofabi--- who put the camera in a Starbucks restroom. But suing Starbucks for being negligent? That doesn’t make a lot of sense either. link

The Arbor Lodge - Raising the coffee bar and bringing the community together

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If you are an avid Portland coffee drinker or a regular reader of this blog, you know that you can find good coffee in most parts of the city. Downtown, Southeast and Northeast PDX are hotbeds for great coffee. Northwest has its share too, as does North Portland to the east of I-5.

But what about far-out North Portland, west of the interstate? Can you find good coffee up there? It turns out you can, and you don’t even have to look too hard. After a little exploration yesterday, I found a brand-new place at the corner of Interstate Avenue and Rosa Parks Way that is worth visiting. The Arbor Lodge just opened this week, and it is going to raise the bar for what passes as quality coffee in that part of the city.

When you walk in, you first notice the smell of fresh paint and varnish, as the café fixtures are all new. In its previous incarnation, the building was a struggling-to-survive mini-mart. Scott Davison, the café’s kilt-wearing owner, has completely transformed the building into a coffee shop, though he did not do it by himself. Friends from around the neighborhood helped, pitching into donate their carpentry, painting, washing—whatever they could to support his efforts. Thank you notes are situated around the café, acknowledging people for their help in getting the café off the ground.

The first thing I did, as I am wont to do, was quiz the barista about the espressos. The café had two different single-origin espressos available, both roasted by Coava. There was a Nicaraguan coffee called Bella Aurora and a Costa Rican coffee from Finca Zarcero. The barista described them as having similar profiles, with the Costa Rican being “brighter” (both “tasty,” of course). I elected for the more northern of the two. The shots she made me were consistent, with a distinct tanginess and notes of walnuts and toffee.

Everything seems new (because it is)

I sat down to chat with Davison, to find out more about his shiny new café. He began by explaining why he opened a café in the first place.

“I see coffee as a medium,” he told me. “It gives people in the community an opportunity to come together in a neighborhood that doesn’t have that many options.”

The café is named after the Arbor Lodge neighborhood where it is located. Davison explained, “We called it that because we really wanted the shop to be a part of  the neighborhood.”

Scott Davison, the owner

Although this is his first time owning a coffee shop, Davison is not completely new to the coffee industry. Originally from Olympia, he spent two years working for Starbucks, back in the days when the company still had manual espresso machines and a more coffee-focused business. Several of the friends he grew up with ended up getting into the coffee business in one way or another, so opening a shop seemed natural to Davison. He already has a popular food cart downtown, Give Pizza a Chance, and he felt like his experience running that would translate well to the coffee shop.

When I asked about his vision for the future of his new café, he said that he would like to “serve the best cups of coffee in town, without any attitude.”

Davison emphasized the importance of combining great coffee with friendly service. “Even if the coffee is excellent, if you come in and have a bad experience, you’ve had a bad cup of coffee. You can’t have one without the other.”

Beyond having great coffee and service, Davison also hopes to see the cafe become a place where the neighborhood gathers together. The café space will be available to rent out in the evenings for community events and activities. Multiple times he said he would like it to be a place where Arbor Lodge residents seek out each other.

Gratitude

When residents do come, one feature of the café they will notice is its unique tables. Fashioned out of a 114-year-old deadfall Sitka spruce, the tables are made from massive slabs of natural wood. Davison hired someone to cut the sections, then he and a friend attached the legs and finished the tops. Looking at them, you can imagine the once-mighty spruce towering over an Oregon forest.

Keeping it close to home, the Arbor Lodge Cafe features local pastries (Nuvrei), art (right now it’s from Jolby & Friends, a design firm in Portland that also did the café’s branding) and teas (Foxfire). To make sure you feel like you are visiting a Portland coffee shop, there is a retro olive green couch and a patch of black shag carpet at the back of the café. Throw in the carefully-roasted coffee from Coava, and residents of the Arbor Lodge neighborhood (and anyone venturing to this part of North Portland) have a new meeting place, a namesake they can call their own.  

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Vitals
Address: 1507 N Rosa Parks Way, Portland, OR 97217 (map)
Phone: 503-289-1069
Hours: Monday-Saturday 6:30am-6pm
            Sunday 7am-5pm
Coffee: Coava
Free Wi-Fi? Yes
Recommendations? If you need an outlet for your laptop, sit near the front
Website: www.thearborlodge.com

Hard knocks - listening to true stories of life at Albina Press (Hawthorne)

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The Albina Press on Hawthorne is much hipster than the AP on Albina. Maybe it is the neighborhood, maybe it is the café space itself, or maybe it just happened to be the day I was there, but I stepped inside the café and quickly felt at home in the café.

The coffee bar is unique in its arrangement. Instead of having the bar up against one wall of the café, as most cafés do, at AP Hawthorne the bar is located in the center of the café. The cash register and espresso machine take up two sides of the rectangle, and an L-shaped table for seating form the other two sides. The open space allows patrons to check out the baristas’ operations from all sides.

AP Hawthorne

My espresso, served in a sunny yellow demitasse, was solid. AP is a Stumptown café, and every day I grow more and more accustomed to the Hair Bender blend. If I ever leave Portland, I’ll probably look back with affection on my time in the city, when I could get Stumptown’s tangy, chocolaty blend in nearly every part of the city (I never would have imagined saying that, based on my first impression of the blend, which was not favorable).

Although I did have a couple good shots of espresso while I was at the café, the enduring memory from my visit will be my conversation with “Ron” (not his real name). I was sitting at a window table, writing the next “great American novel” (more accurately, the next CPDX blog post), when to my left, I sensed someone staring at me. For a while, I avoided looking over, but the person didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. Finally my resolve to avoid looking faltered and I lifted my eyes from the screen to figure out who it was staring my direction.

A gentleman in his late forties or early fifties, with a round build, a round, balding head and a scraggly beard was standing about five feet away holding a latte in his hand. He looked like he wanted to talk, and I apparently looked like a good person to talk to. Generally, I don’t mind listening to people. A lot of times they just have things they want to get off their chest, and you never know when they start talking what kinds of interesting things you might learn. My only hope is that they don’t end up asking me for money.

Ron’s first question, breaking the ice, was to ask me how to look someone up on the computer. According to him, he didn’t have any computer experience and he was trying to find his kids. It had been about 15 years since he had seen them. He and his wife had divorced years ago (on bad terms, I presume) and he had lost contact with them. Since they were now adults, he could contact them without any legal repercussions.

I vaguely gave him some advice on how to use Google, unsure if it was any of my business to help him find someone who had not seen him in over a decade—someone who might not want to be found. I thought that my advice would be the end of our conversation, but I was wrong. Ron was looking for someone to share his story with.

The story he told me was a sad one. Ron had been in the Navy for 12 years, and while he was there he met his wife. They married and had two kids, but then he had an accident on duty and his injuries made it impossible for him to perform his service, so he was discharged. His wife stayed in, and was deployed to the Persian Gulf during the war to liberate Kuwait. While over there, she fell prey to loneliness and the temptations of war, coming back pregnant with someone else’s child. When Ron found out, he “took off his ring, handed it to her and left.”

Out of the service, Ron tried to find a job, but the stress he was under and the alcohol he was drinking (heavily, in his words) weakened his heart to the point of having “four heart attacks.” His condition led the state to take away his driver’s license, making it impossible to keep a job, so he “retired,” going on state disability insurance and VA benefits to support himself. It was during these tough times that under duress (according to him), he signed over his parental rights, agreeing that he would not try to contact his sons until they were adults, with the threat of jail time for violating the agreement. Now that they were both over 18, Ron was hoping to contact them one more time to see if they would be interested in rebuilding some kind of relationship with their father.

It wasn’t easy to listen to the story, as I could imagine some of the struggles he has had over the last decade and a half. He did not seem as downbeat as he might have, though there was a lot of loneliness that came through in his voice. He probably was just looking for someone to listen to him.

During our conversation, Ron pulled out a blue folder and showed me a couple pictures of his sons and some other things that he had in his bag. He also showed me a copy of the birth certificate of one of his sons, his old marriage license and a copy of his VA benefit application from twenty years ago.

The stuff he carried with him was revealing. When our lives are filled with uncertainty, we cling to concrete things from our past that are unchanging—memories, documents and photographs that remind us of times when we thought we had life figured out. When life seems to slip from our grasp, our instinct is to find something to hold onto, an anchor that gives us a sense of stability. This can lead us to hold tightly to possessions that help us feel normal. At least that’s the impression I got from listening to him and seeing his documents.

After leaving the café, Ron’s next stop was going to be the coin store that was next door (he was looking for some collector quarters), and then it was on to the VA and the library. At least that was what he said. You never know with someone like Ron how much of their story is based in reality an how much has been elaborated in his mind. Watching him leave, I could only hope for the best for him as I resumed my writing.

By and large, I enjoyed my visit to the Hawthorne incarnation of the Albina Press. The café is large, with ample seating. You can comfortably gather with a large group or you can hide yourself in a corner with a good book or your laptop if you don’t feel like talking to anyone. Then again, you might find yourself in an unexpected conversation, ready or not.

Vitals

Address: 5012 SE Hawthorne, Portland, OR 97215 (map)

Coffee: Stumptown

Free Wi-Fi? Fast

Recommendations? Sitting outside and enjoying the last vestiges of summer, coffee in hand

Website: nope

Coffee news and notes

After two weeks away from Portland, I made it back down the gorge. It was sooooo nice to be welcomed back with 60-degree, cloudy weather all week. Okay, maybe that’s not true, but it was nice to get back to some good coffee shops. My favorite café in Dayton has closed, so I spent a couple weeks coffee-free, surviving (but barely).

In other news, school has started up again in most places, and hopefully, so will the regularity of these blog posts. Here are a few links for your Friday afternoon:

Better watch what’s in that coffee: a woman in Florida spiked her husband’s coffee with Xanax (a prescription drug used to treat anxiety) in an effort to “calm him down.” The local police disagreed with her account, charging her with attempted murder. link

Fortunately, we live in a very different era than 50 years ago, especially when thinking of coffee, advertising and the relationship between men and women. Someone put together a video called “Coffee Jerks,” with TV clips from the 1950s and 60s. It’s almost painful to watch.  link

High school students across Ontario, Canada, will have to sneak their caffeine into schools after the government banned coffee from being sold on campus. Toronto’s Globe and Mail (newspaper) is not too impressed with the ban. Student seem to be getting around the ban, however, as some are bringing coffee makers from home to plug in by their lockers. Really? link

Think that having a light rail line outside your door will help your coffee business? Some café owners in Minneapolis might disagree. link

Alec Baldwin complaining about a Starbucks barista with an attitude problem? The axiom “it takes one to know one” might be applicable here. link

If you only read the headline to this article, you might think to yourself “what happens when we run out of bags?” Not to worry, though. We can always re-use them…

Starbuckian K-cuppers will be able to get their fix at home starting in November. link

I’m going to leave out the link to the article for this one because I want to support local businesses, but when a coffee shop owner brags about having 30 flavors of syrup available, she ought to take coffee out of their business name…

Vacation caffeination

I’m on vacation the next couple weeks, which really means that I went home to work harvest. If you missed it last year, I wrote a few stories about harvest. Here’s one of my favorites that I wrote while I was in Beijing (link). I’ll try to post a few times while I’m here, spending all day in the field doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing.

Here are a couple links from around the coffee world:

Headed to LA and need some coffee recommendations? Oliver Strand, who writes The New York Times’ Ristretto column, just visited and has some thoughts to share with you. link

Could coffee drinkers finally getting some good news about coffee prices? It appears so, at least if you drink Maxwell House. link All of those recent price hikes? They’re working, at least for shareholders (according to the video embedded in the article).

Starbucks’ Howard Schultz is urging CEOs of American corporations to stop all political campaign donations until Congress starts compromising and coming up with forward-thinking, long-term solutions to our nation’s economic problems.  link [Note how the content of the article was molded to fit the WSJ’s political viewpoint. The CEO quoted in the article was not even a part of Schultz’ group and he was only quoted as concerned with cutting spending.]

I know it’s bad form to answer a question with a question, but the answer to this headline should be, “Will anyone care?” link According to the author, DD’s “pastries and coffee are craved by a large portion of the western United States.”  Really? How many DDs are there in Portland?

And with that, I’m out…