Kobos Coffee (Part 2) - How Kobos came to PDX

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[Part 1 of this history can be found here]

Originally from Massachusetts, David Kobos spent many of his years growing up in New York. The pursuit of higher education eventually led him out West, and he spent four years getting a master’s degree from Reed College. After graduating, he taught in Milwaukie for a couple years. During this time, Kobos used to stop in and get coffee from Boyd’s Little Red Wagon.

“That's how I got started drinking real coffee," he said.

After his time in Milwaukie, Kobos moved back to New York, where he got a job as a teacher at a school in the Lower East Side (of Manhattan). In his free time, he began exploring restaurants in Chinatown and Little Italy, which were both nearby the school. He became fascinated with the city’s food and coffee culture and began visiting the shops of the Lower West Side too, where the Shapiro Brothers and the McNulty family were famous for roasting coffee.

At some point during his culinary explorations, Kobos met his future wife and got married. The couple went on a honeymoon to the Pacific Northwest and then returned to the Big Apple. Together, they really got into exploring restaurants. His wife was a good cook, he said, so they began to shop at higher-quality markets, trying to duplicate at home what they had been tasting in restaurants. The couple also drank plenty of coffee and visited all of New York’s famous cafés.

Kobos recalled some of the smells in the neighborhoods where the stores roasted their own coffee:

"There was this one little Italian roaster, down in Little Italy, who used to take one kind of coffee and just burn the hell out of it. You could smell it if you went anywhere near that place,” he said, laughing.

Eventually, the Kobos and his wife decided they needed a change of scenery. Remembering the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, they decided to move across the country to Portland, where they would indulge their love of food and coffee by starting a cookware and coffee retail store (and a family). It was a lot of change in a short amount of time, and their friends were skeptical.

“’You’re doing what?’—that’s what they asked us. They thought we were crazy,” Kobos said, recalling the reactions of his friends and family. “You’ve got a job already. Why would you want to do that?”

Undeterred, the couple moved forward with their plans. However, plans soon changed. The original plan was to ask Boyd’s Coffee to roast coffee beans for Kobos to sell in the store, but when David asked them, they turned him down. It was a pivotal moment for the Kobos story.

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Kobos Coffee (Part 1) – Helping write PDX coffee history

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[Note: This is part one of a two-part article. You can find part two here]

If you were to write a history of the Portland coffee scene, the story would not be complete without a visit to Kobos Coffee. Founded in 1973 by David and Susan Kobos, Kobos Coffee was one of the first companies in the area to roast its own coffee, and has since grown into one of the largest coffee roasters in Portland.

Without knowing any of the company’s history, the first time I went to Kobos, I was surprised to walk into the company’s Vaughn Street café and be surrounded by what looked like the kitchen department at Macy’s. In addition to lots of coffee paraphernalia and an espresso bar, there was lots of brightly-lit and brightly-colored kitchen gadgetry, including dishes, linens and other housewares.

Inside the store at Kobos' Vaughn St. Café

I wanted to find out what the story was, so after “meeting” Kobos’ Kevin Dibble in Twitterspace, we arranged a time to meet and talk about the company’s operations. When I arrived at the store, Kevin, who is also one of Kobos’ roasters, greeted me and took me back to the offices. He introduced me to Brian Dibble, his father and co-owner of Kobos. Together, they led me through the roasting plant and told me about the company’s operations.

Our first stop on the tour was the coffee warehouse. It was spacious, with pallets piled up with large burlap sacks full of green coffee beans. Brian said that there were about twenty different origins and varieties represented in the warehouse. He said that Kobos roasts about 40,000 pounds of coffee each month. That’s a lot of coffee, and it goes to a lot of different places.

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Coffee Links (with commentary) for May 20, 2011

Another day, a few links, and lots of coffee. If you’re in Portland today, enjoy the sun!

From the newly created bad puns department, Starbucks fans will soon be going gaga over. . . . . Gaga. link

In last week’s links, I wrote that Seattle’s Best claimed it could now be found in 50,000 locations. Not for long. link

An Australian tourist visits Portland to see if the city really lives up to its Portlandia reputation. He (or she?) visits a few coffee shops and especially likes Heart and Public Domain (must have a thing for modernist décor). link

For coffee techies and espresso nerds, David Schomer has a great new post on his blog about the science of grinding beans. It’s titled “Micro-particle Migration in Conical Grinding Systems” (some people really get into their coffee). link

It appears that drinking coffee significantly reduces the risk of prostate cancer by 60%. link

Having just finished reading Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, I am a little skeptical. The relationship between coffee and cancer might be a correlation, not a causation. link

Might the next roasting industry in Portland be chocolate instead of coffee? Not for a while, but maybe someday. link

Cellar Door Coffee Roasters is optimistic about future growth, according to an article published in Portland Business Journal. link

Consolidation in the coffee industry: Smuckers buys Rowland Coffee for $360 million. link

In other industry consolidation news (and what may be a sign for the impending rapture tomorrow), Starbucks is in talks to buy Stumptown Coffee in order to help the coffee giant set up a new “Specialty Coffee” division. An unnamed executive at the coffee giant was quoted as saying that “our coffee quality has been sliding and we need to get back to our coffee roots. With its exquisitely-roasted coffee and nationwide name recognition, Stumptown seemed like the perfect partner for us.”  (if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for sale that you might be interested in. link)

Note: there is no truth to the last one. None whatsoever. There’s not even a rumor. Just wanted to see if you were still paying attention. Have a great weekend!

Selling Frappuccinos in the UK

Below, I have embedded an ad from a campaign that Unruly Media is running in the UK for Starbucks. I would like to hear your opinion. Beneath the video, I have given mine.

One of the challenges for any company is to decide if it wants to go for fast growth and large profits, sacrificing a few of its values along the way, or if it wants to remain true to its roots, even if it has to sacrifice some economic gains. For most businesses, profits come first. This is especially true for public companies, where there is tremendous pressure put on management by the shareholders to go for growth and profits. I think you can guess which path Starbucks chose.

Starbucks began as a place that wanted to be true to the coffee and the café experience. Now it boldly sells milkshakes, with whipped cream and caramel sauce.

To be honest, I like the graphics, the bright colors and the crisp audio of the spot. It has a sharp feel to it. The business school-trained part of me thinks it’s a fine ad, and I know that Frappuccinos have some of the best profit margins at Starbucks, so I understand the reasons for the campaign. At the end, however, watching this ad reminds me why Starbucks took the “Coffee” out of its new logo. How about you?

[Disclosure: Unruly Media, an advertising company, asked me to write an editorial about the ad. Feel free to pass it on to anyone you know in the UK]

Links, links

Some coffee news from the last week:

Stumptown’s beans made it into the Oliver Strand’s New York Times column about his trip to Philadelphia. link

If you are concerned about how “green” your coffee is, the most important factor is how the coffee was grown, according to a study done in Switzerland. link

Italian authorities won a recent battle against the coffee mafia. link

In Oakland, California, a company is growing mushrooms out of used coffee grounds. link

Starbucks’ Howard Schultz once again blames high coffee prices on speculators, and predicts that the price of coffee is going to come back down this year. link

Taiwan’s coffee production and consumption are increasing rapidly. link

A difference between men and women: women prefer the smell of coffee to help them wake up, while men prefer fried food. link

Sounds like the Garden Grove City coffee shops were getting a little too wild. There was too much nudity and gambling (the most interesting part of the story is the fake Pac-Man games). link

On a similar note, the Grand View (topless) coffee shop in Vassalboro, Maine, will no longer offer quite the same view. They were busted for putting up illegal signs and have decided to leave town. link

Seattle’s Best Coffee (a misnomer) can now be bought at 50,000 different locations. Now that’s ubiquity. link

Bad news if you have a brain aneurysm. No more coffee or sex. link

These days, many people choose to not carry cash, only using credit or debit cards to pay for everything. While the cards are convenient, the fees associated with them are very hard on a café’s margins. A battle to regulate these fees is raging in Congress. link

Sweet and spicy

This weather, in the present-day vernacular, is getting “ridiculous.” It’s May. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of the cold. So far this year, we’ve been teased with the occasional nice day, but our expectant hearts are then dashed to the ground by the next untimely cold front. It’s time for some heat.

Speaking of heat, that’s what I found today when I tried a “Toddy Diablo.”

The time: 3:00pm.

The place: First Cup, on Woodstock.

If you were to have a “throw down” between the coffee shops on Woodstock, First Cup would probably win. The shop is pretty small, so it gets a little cramped sometimes. It is a place for Reedies to hang out and there are often lots of students coming in and out. The atmosphere is welcoming, if you can find a seat. They serve Stumptown coffee, with Hair Bender available every day as one of the two brewed coffees and also as the espresso.

Since summer is supposedly approaching, cafés are pulling out their warm-weather drinks more these days, including cold-brewed coffee. Today, First Cup was advertising a “Toddy Diablo,” a “cold-pressed coffee with a house-made chile syrup” (toddy is the term for cold-brewed coffee that cool Portland cafés use—there’s no whisky in it). A couple months ago, I tried my first cold-brew coffee at Case Study. That was a memorable first time, and I have been a fan of the cold brew ever since.

I asked the barista what she thought of the Diablo. A sly grin came to her face when she told me, as if it were a secret between us, that the drink was really good. Devilishly good, perhaps?

She described it as spicy, not like habanero peppers, but more of a smoky, slow burn. Would I like to try it?

Yes, please.

The first sip of the drink was revealing—not quite like I expected. Instead of raw heat, the coffee had a hint of sweetness. Sweet and then hot. The barista later told me that the sugar gives the spice something to hold onto and is better than using only pepper in the syrup. As you swallow, the pepper warms your mouth, with the heat slowly moving to the back of your throat and downward, until you feel a slow simmering in your chest. The aftertaste is a touch smoky, like smoldering wood chips. It reminds you of drinking coffee prepared over a campfire.

Like my first iced coffee, the Diablo was another memorable first time. It’s not something you would drink every day, but for those days when you are looking for something different, when you need something to spice up your coffee palate and shake off the erratic Portland spring weather, try the Diablo at First Cup. If you dare.

Xpression Coffeehouse - jazz and java

The other day, I went searching for a different café in Southwest Portland. I had a couple hours to kill before I picked my daughter up at preschool, and although there are a couple cafés fairly close to the school, I have not been overly excited by either of them. I knew there was another coffee shop in the area I wanted to try out, so I went looking for it. It wasn’t easy to find, though, and I was about to give up when I glanced over and saw the sign for Xpression Coffeehouse to my right.  It turned out to be a nice discovery.

As I entered the café, the first thing I noticed was that it felt very welcoming. Soft jazz music was playing and a strong scent of coffee filled the air. The barista greeted me as I came up to the counter. She was working on a drink for the person in front of me and said she would be right with me. I waited, listening to the music that was playing, reading the information screen located behind the register. I was surprised to read that the music was original and composed specifically for the café.

“That’s one way to get around the music-industrial complex,” I thought, recalling an article I had recently read discussing coffee shops and music copyright issues.

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