Friday's Links - February 18

Friday has come quickly again this week. Hope you are ready for a good weekend. Here are your Friday links:

Reuters has a story about the coffee culture in Iran. It sounds like the country has a small but growing coffee industry that is catching on among young people. link

In the article, the author mentions an Iranian coffee chain called Raees, which Starbucks unsuccessfully sued for infringement of trademark. You can see the logo for yourself here. I cannot imagine why Starbucks was upset (sarcasm intended).

As you know, single-serve coffee is the fastest growing segment of the coffee market. Starbucks wants in on the game too. There was speculation that Starbucks was in talks with Green Mountain Coffee over using the K-cup technology that Green Mountain owns. This week, however, Howard Schultz wrote a very cryptic memo to company employees about those rumors. It appears that Starbucks is either trying to create leverage in its talks with Green Mountain, or the company has plans to develop its own technology. Either way, it does not seem like you are going to have Starbucks K-cups for a while. link

Here’s an article about Maryland coffee shops, posted on a Kitsap, Washington site. Sounds like lots of Laptopistanis are out there working in coffee shops. I can relate. link

If you’re traveling through Forsyth County, Georgia, you might want to avoid stopping at this particular Starbucks, as it has been hit by a car twice in the last month.

Good.com has an interesting map of the world’s coffee consumption. Most of the coffee is not consumed in the places where it is grown. link

If you like the toasted smoky taste of coffee but are tired of caffeine, you could always try roasted barley. link

Want to know more about the history of coffee? Prague has a good museum to visit. link

An Irish traveler visited Portland and came away with a very favorable opinion. Surprisingly, the visit was in January. link

How do you store coffee?

Quick, what are the two most destructive things on earth?

I will give you 10 seconds to come up with them.

1. . .2. . .3. . .4. . .5. . .6. . .7. . .8. . .9. . .10

Okay, what are they?

I can only guess at some of the answers you might have come up with: Guns, nuclear bombs, George W. Bush (if you are a Democrat), single-payer health care (if you are a Republican).

I might pick ignorance, but actually, the two most destructive things on earth are water and air. Water, given enough time, can move mountains. Air, or more specifically oxygen, combines with many materials to cause destruction in the form of rust, or in some cases, fire.

As you can imagine then, if you are trying to preserve your coffee beans, you do not want them to come into contact with either air or water (heat and light are two more things that coffee beans should stay away from). If  you can remember this, you have a pretty good idea of how to store coffee. Ideally, you would not store your beans for very long, but if you must, then these tips will help you get the best flavor out of them.

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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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February 11 Links

It's that time again. Here are some coffee highlights from the last week:

There’s “Portland Weird” and then there’s “Silicon Valley Weird”. When you go to this link, be sure to watch the video of the robot that visits a local coffee shop in Mountain View, California. It’s kind of cool—and kind of creepy. link

Smuckers is raising the price on Folgers coffee, the third price increase in the past year. Just one more reason to stop drinking Folgers. link

Growing middle classes around the world are bound to have a long-term effect on coffee prices, as consumers demand better quality. MarketWatch has a short article about the effect the expanding middle class in Brazil is having on coffee prices. link

Coffee won’t make you fat, but what you put into it, might. link

Oliver Strand of the NY Times admires the pour-over culture that the US has imported from Japan. link

Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz has joined the board of directors of Groupon, which is reportedly planning an IPO later this year. Is there half-priced coffee in the future at Starbucks? I doubt it. Hopefully the company will have better TV commercials. link

Speaking of Groupon, Colin Smith does not think the company should have rejected Google’s $6 billion takeover offer. He raises some good points. link

It might be possible to find some wicked good coffee in Boston after all. link

The BBC has a video report about how rising coffee prices should be good for India’s coffee growers. link

A coffee shop in New York City is taking the direct-trade model of coffee sourcing very seriously, only selling Rwandan coffees that it buys directly from farmers. link

A Winlock, Washington artist paints swirling figures rising from coffee cups in sepia tones. His paint? Coffee grounds mixed with water. And you thought you were obsessed with coffee. link

And finally, in time for Valentine’s day, an ode to “Timeless Coffee Love” from Portland Roasting Coffee’s blog. link

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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Freshness, grind, and making due with old equipment

If you’re like me, you might not have the best-quality tools for making coffee, so you have to do the best you can with what you’ve got. Fortunately, there are coffee experts among us who can help us do just that. The other day, Matt and Liam from the Stumptown Annex gave me some good coffee advice that I wanted to pass along to you.

I went to the Annex to buy some coffee to brew at home, and since I was buying good (and somewhat pricy) beans, I wanted make sure the beans were prepared properly. I have a very poor-quality blade grinder, so the question was: would be better to have them grind the coffee to the correct size, or should I take the beans home and grind them myself as needed? As you know, freshness is one of the most important factors that determines the taste of the coffee, but the grind is important too. Where was the trade-off between bean freshness and an accurate grind? The two coffee experts cleared things up.

They told me that since I was using a French press, it would probably be better to grind the beans myself at home. With some brewing methods, having an even grind is of paramount importance. However, of all the brewing methods, the French press method is the most forgiving, and you can get away with some variation in the size of the grounds. If they were to grind the beans, many of the aromatics that give the coffee its richness would soon be gone. Therefore, they reasoned, freshness was more important and I should grind them myself at home. Sounded like solid advice to me.

The two also gave me some advice on how to make the most of my rickety grinder (if you have a good burr grinder, you can disregard this). They were confident that I could still grind the beans well for the French press if I used a couple tricks.

First, in order to get the best grind possible, don’t just set the grinder on the counter and turn it on. As you grind the coffee, shake the grinder up and down in order to keep the coffee stirred up. That way you will not end up with lots of finely-ground coffee at the bottom and coarsely ground coffee at the top.

You should also pulse the grinder so that it does not continually run while you are grinding the beans. Pulsing will reduce the heat generated by the blades. You don’t want the grounds to heat up because the flavor compounds literally vaporize at higher temperatures, leaving you with a somewhat flat coffee.

To help me gauge the right size, Matt sent me home with a sample of coffee ground with their commercial grinder, allowing me to compare my grind to the proper grind. This is something I recommend you do too if you are using a blade grinder. The baristas at your favorite café should be happy to grind some beans to the proper size for you to use as a guide.

By following these tips, you might not brew the best pot of coffee you have ever had, but you will definitely make the most of your brewing equipment.

Good coffee is even possible with this. . . an antique from the 90s

Happy grinding and enjoy your fresh-ground coffee.