Case Study Coffee - Coffee on the Rocks

It had been a while since I had been to a new café, and I was feeling particularly motivated to try something new, so I headed to Northeast Sandy Boulevard to check out Case Study Coffee. Case Study is one of the newer cafés in Portland, having opened only eight months ago. The café sent two baristas to the 2011 Northwest Regional Barista Championship. Neither of the baristas made the finals, but the fact that such a new café would send two competitors to the competition shows that Case Study is serious about coffee.

Case Study Coffee

While it may be fairly new, Case Study appears to not be a secret. During my time in the café, a steady stream of customers came through the door. The café was fairly loud—not with music, but with people talking. I overheard people brainstorming about their next big creative venture [on a side note, have you seen Portlandia’s sketch about creative ventures? It takes place in one of the cafés we have already reviewed here]. Several Laptopistanis were glued to their screens and some of them also had their smartphones glued to one ear. I watched a writer distractedly go between staring at her notebook and checking her email on her iPhone. It looked like she either had writer’s block or she was hoping that the phone would give her a legitimate reason to not be productive.

Click to read more ...

Robots and pour-overs

In the coffee shops of Portland, one of the trendiest things you can get is a coffee brewed using the pour-over brewing method (this is not exclusive to Portland, as you can see by reading this CoffeeGeek.com discussion). Most, if not all, of the specialty cafés around town offer customers the pour-over option. The baristas at these shops may soon have some new competition—from a robot.

The pour-over is a very old brewing method, but it is being revived for several reasons, not least of which because it makes great coffee theater. Baristas delicately pour thin, even streams of water over freshly-ground coffee, concentrating hard to evenly wet the grounds. Some have a special pouring pattern that they believe improves the results. The single serving pour-over method guarantees that you get the freshest coffee possible. When coffee is made this way, much of the brightness and fruity notes really stand out. If the barista uses a Melitta or Chemex filter, as most do, the coffee is also very clean.

The double pour-over. You can see how it might be difficult to pull this off effectively.

Click to read more ...

News and Links for Friday

Fresh from the search engines, here are your coffee links for the week. Enjoy!

In the least surprising news of the week, Seattle and Portland were voted the best coffee cities in America by Travel & Leisure. link

Baristas beware—there’s a new robot pour-over master in town that might brew better coffee than you do (with video). link

Generosity is alive and well in Lampedusa, Italy, where a café owner offers free coffee to Tunisian migrants who cannot pay for it. link

Dunkin’ Donuts signed a deal last week to put its coffee in the K-cups. This week, there is speculation that Peet’s will do the same. I do not foresee Stumptown joining the stampede to sell K-cups, thankfully. link

Nespresso was dealt a blow this week when a Swiss court ruled that Denner could sell coffee capsules that are compatible with Nespresso’s machine. link

In other Nespresso news, the company did manage to be one of the first companies to place its products in a British television show. This is a new and controversial new practice in the UK that has been around for years in the US. link

Starbucks and Kraft, one step closer to finalizing their divorce. link

In Massachusetts, a mini-van crashed into a coffee shop (includes video). Oops. link

David Sarasohn, editor of the Oregonian, gives his take on the Republicans’ decision to bring back Styrofoam to the House cafeteria. link

If you regularly drink any of the drinks on this list, you might want to reconsider, for your health’s sake.

Fox News does not like the fact that the town of Orange, Connecticut was ordered to reinstate casual Fridays and pay for workers’ coffee. link

Melissa Ward Aguilar does mention that she stops at a coffee plantation on her trip to Costa Rica, but it’s the zip lines through the rain forest that sound like the most fun to me. link

Another report about rising coffee prices, this time in the Wall Street Journal. link

Fair Trade is not the same as Fairtrade, and neither might be the guarantee of ethical business practices that you think they are. link

Um viagem lindo (A beautiful trip)

Here’s some creative writing that I did for a contest for Trazzler, a travel website that relies on readers to describe their experiences at various places around the world. Entries for the contest were supposed to be less than 120 words and written in the “Trazzler style.” I chose to write about Coffeehouse Northwest. The entry didn’t win anything, but it was still fun to write. Thought I’d share it with you.

Dreaming of Brazil in Portland, Oregon 

Looking for relief from the gray Portland winter, I slip in the back door at Coffeehouse Northwest.

What cure for the blues do you have on grind? I ask, knowing that the ever-changing espresso lineup always offers something sublime.

A Brazilian coffee from Serra Negra, the barista replies—a  “black saw” to cut through the doldrums. I order a double. It has hints of strawberries and summer sun.

Sip by sip, my spirits rise. Over the speakers, the Girl from Ipanema is swaying down to the sea, and my escape to Rio is complete. Refreshed, I slip out the back door, ready to face the gray once more.

Turkish coffee at Marino Adriatic Café

If you are hanging out in Portland and you get tired of drinking great espresso and brewed coffee, you have some other options available too. I was wandering up Southeast Division the other day when I came across Marino Adriatic Café, a quirky spot just a couple blocks down the street from the original Stumptown. The café is definitely an original, and it might be the only café in the city where you can get Vispak, a coffee roasted in Bosnia. When I went, I was looking for something different, so I ordered a Turkish coffee.

Kristi, the barista, showed me how they make Turkish coffee at Caffè Marino. She started with super-finely ground coffee, and put one or two tablespoons in the bottom of a cezve (also known as an ibrik), a small copper pot that is the traditional vessel for making Turkish coffee. She set the cezve on the counter while she heated some water in a kettle.

When the water began to boil, Kristi took it off the burner and placed the cezve containing the dry grounds directly on the burner for 5-10 seconds, toasting them a little bit.

At this point, she added the water to the cezve and put it back on the burner. In less than a minute, the mixture began to boil, creating a frothy brown layer that threatened to spill over the sides of the cezve. Each time it was about to spill, Kristi pulled the pot off the heat and gently tapped it on the counter. She repeated this process three times.

Having prepared the coffee, she served it on a small round copper tray, along with a delicate ceramic cup about the size of a demitasse. Kristi suggested I wait a couple minutes before pouring my coffee so that the grounds could brew a little longer and so they could settle to the bottom of the cezve. There is no filter involved with Turkish coffee, so you have to be careful when you pour it, or you will get a cup full of grit.

My Turkish coffee, served in the cezve

Click to read more ...

Coffee links - February 25

Links for February 25, 2011

Is it possible to grow coffee in Portland? Marrowmag.com has an interesting article about Coava’s Matt Higgins trying to grow coffee in his basement. link

Coffee futures reached their highest price in fourteen years this week. Of course, it could be worse for consumers—cocoa prices are the highest they have been in thirty-two years. link

Brazil’s government is holding onto its coffee stocks, in anticipation of even higher prices to come this year. link

After seeing Starbucks make a deal with Tata to enter the Indian market, Dunkin’ Donuts decided it wants some of the action too. link

Dunkin’ also made a deal this week with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to put its coffee into the K-cups. The question is, should you short Green Mountain’s stock? That’s what Steven Syre, writing in the Boston Globe, tries to figure out. link

If you like Bollywood films and you like coffee, you might like Kudirithe Kappu Coffee. link

The Calgary Herald sees a parallel between the coffee and the chocolate industries. link

Even as worldwide demand for coffee has increased, Kenya’s coffee production has decreased over the last two decades, according to Business Daily Africa. Richard Gitonga, the author, proposes some solutions. link

Growing higher-quality coffee has brought a higher standard of living to coffee farmers in Uganda. link

I just like the picture in this coffee article.

Did you know that you can make oatmeal in your coffee maker? A better question might be, why would you want to?

Barista Profile – Thomas Suprenant

[Over the last several months, I have spent quite a few hours in cafés, learning about coffee and giving my impressions of the cafés. It has been fun. There are so many good cafés and I have been spoiled to be able try so many different (and high-quality) coffees. While I love the adventure, one of the downsides of doing this is that I feel an obligation to keep looking for new cafés all the time, and I never really become a regular at any of them.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to focus more on the people and the stories behind the coffee shops in this city as opposed to the cafés themselves. I am still going to write the occasional café review (there are more cafés that I want to visit), but that will be less of a focus. Instead, I will be working to meet people and talk about a variety of coffee-related things. If you are someone who has a café, is a barista, roasts coffee or just loves coffee and has a unique story to tell, let me know what you are up to and I will share your story here. I would like to interview you and learn more about the great things you are doing (if you are doing something great that is not related to coffee, we can figure out some tie-in, even if we just sit down over a cup of good coffee). The following is the first post in that direction.]

Thomas Suprenant is one of the skilled baristas at Cellar Door Coffee Roasters. In the picture above, he is competing at his first Northwest Regional Barista Championship in January. On my recent stop at the café, Thomas gave me a tour and sat down to tell me a little bit of his own story. Many thanks to Cassie, the other barista on duty, for taking care of the café while we were talking.

Click to read more ...