We have a winner

The mystery café contest has come and gone. Congratulations to Vinnie Kinsella for figuring out that the café was Lents Commons, located at the corner of 92^nd and Foster in SE Portland (review coming one of these days). As promised, Vinnie is going to receive a bag of fresh Portland coffee. He figured out that the café from the clues I sent out on Twitter (are you following Caffeinated PDX on Twitter yet?). 

The coffee prize this time is from Cellar Door, a roaster in inner SE PDX. Thomas Suprenant, a barista at Cellar Door who competed in the NWRBC, helped me select it. He chose a Costa Rica ‘Esquipulas’, a coffee that has been honey-processed, which means that a very specific amount of the fruit is left on the bean when it dries, adding a bit of sweetness and flavor to the finished beans. The coffee is described as having a “rich medium body, sweet lemon & honey hard-candy clarity.” It was roasted this morning, so it is fresh.

Waiting for the French press

Vinnie is a freelance writer, book editor, poet and wordsmith who also teaches in the Master’s of Book Publishing program at Portland State University (Go Vikings!). He is also a coffee shop enthusiast and regular reader of Caffeinated PDX. You can check out his website at http://vinniekinsella.com. Again, congratulations to Vinnie and thanks for reading!

Oblique Coffee Roasters

My last café review was about Albina Press, a place that I said could be a good substitute for the Portlandia set (I probably have mentioned the show too much already, but this time it’s more relevant than usual). Coincidentally, the café that I’m writing about today was part of the actual set for Portlandia. That’s right, part of your favorite satirical show about the city we drink coffee in was actually shot on-site at Oblique Coffee Roasters.

Oblique Coffee Roasters

Somewhat hidden away on Southeast Stark, not too far from Laurelhurst Park, Oblique Coffee Roasters is one of the nicer spaces for a café that I have seen around Portland. The café is located inside what used to be a mercantile, built in 1891. John and Heather Chandler, the owners, completely remodeled it after they bought it.

Actually, ‘remodeled’ makes it sound like they just did a little fixing up, and it doesn’t accurately describe what they did to the building. You can see all of the work they did here. The transformation of the building is remarkable, and I don’t use that term lightly. What they have now is a beautiful space that makes a great place to write or drink coffee.

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Just for fun. . .free coffee

It's the first day of the month today, and you know what that means. . . . Tomorrow is the second.

Okay, that wasn't funny-I heard the groans. To make up for you having to put up with all of my bad jokes (and a few good ones), I want to try something. I'm going to give away a bag of coffee to the first person who can identify the café from the picture below. Call it the "It's the First of the Month and I Wanted to Post Something but I was Tired After Yesterday's Marathon Post so I Decided to Come up with Something to Keep You Interested Caffeinated PDX.com Coffee Giveaway Contest". 

The coffee will be from a Portland-area roaster. It will probably be a 12oz bag, since most places seem to be reducing bag size rather their prices as the cost of green coffee shoots upward. I haven't picked the roaster or the coffee yet (sponsorship opportunity), but it will be a good one. I won't send you anything that is not fresh. However, if you live a long way from PDX, I can't guarantee that the coffee will be fresh by the time it gets to you. Then again, if you live a long way from PDX, you probably won't recognize the picture in the first place.

Each day, starting tomorrow and continuing until someone figures out the mystery, I will Tweet (I can't believe I just wrote that) a clue to help you. If you're not following me on Twitter, it might be a good time to start (obviously, I'm not above bribery). Click the button on the right sidebar to do that (it's the one with the blue bird). Good luck to all, and here goes nothing. . .

Recognize this?Oh yeah, one more thing. You should post your guesses in the comments section below. You get one guess per day. Please don't break that rule. If this goes over without too many problems, we may try something like it again next month. 

PDX Baristas in Action at NWRBC

I spent most of the day on Friday at the Northwest Regional Barista Championship in Tacoma. Brandon Arends and I went up and worked as volunteers, and we had quite a trip.  Portland was well-represented on the first day, with 10 of the 19 competitors coming from PDX. In between cleaning stations and busing tables, I managed to get a few action shots of Portland's finest.  You will probably recognize some of them from some of your favorite cafés.

Unfortunately, I did not make it to Saturday's preliminaries or Sunday's finals, so I missed the five Portland baristas who competed on Saturday (including the eventual champion, Sam Purvis from Coava). I'll have more of a recap tomorrow. 

Ashley Rauch, from Sterling Coffee Roasters, competing in her first Regional Barista Championship.

Kelly Kieft from Cellar Door Coffee Roasters

Kyle Salmi, Albina Press, waiting patiently for the judges

Marty Lopes, Barista. His boss, at far left, looks pretty nervous.

Ryan Wilbur of Stumpton put on quite a show. He ended up finishing second overall, by 0.5 points.

Ray Penrod of Public Domain was stylin'

Devin Chapman, Coava Coffee Roasters, explaining how the cherries and blood oranges blend well with his coffee. In addition to competing in the Barista Championship, Devin won the first-ever Regional Brewing Competition.

Jenny Dorsey, from Case Study Coffee, showed off her cider-making skills in addition to her barista skills.

Adam McGovern, from Sterling Coffee Roasters, holds court.

Thomas Surprenant, from Cellar Door, was the last competitor of day 1. His hops-infused espresso signature beverage was one highlight of the day.

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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