News and Notes from around PDX

[As the café scene is always changing here in Portland, one of my goals is to keep you up to date with what is going on.  Here are a couple quick café notes from today's adventures.]

Bikes and Brew at See See Coffee and Motorcycles

If you’re into motorcycles, you have a new place to drink coffee that is geared toward you. If you’re not into motorcycles, well, you still have a new place to drink coffee. See See Coffee and Motorcycles just opened at the intersection of Northeast Sandy and 17^th.

 

The café’s name comes from the motorcycle theme. The engine displacement of a motorcycle is measured in cubic centimeters (cc – sounds like “see-see”).

The shop is spacious and airy, with a polished concrete floor and an abundance of natural light pouring in through the large skylight and the large front windows. The coffee bar in the center of the room is sheathed with plate steel, giving it a shop-like toughness that you would expect in a motorcycle bar. The bar’s freshly-lacquered hardwood gleams under incandescent lights. Hovering on the western wall, a winding rattlesnake mural warns customers against taking more than their fair share of sugar or napkins.

The café is not just for motorcycle enthusiasts. See See is a full-service coffee bar, offering Stumptown coffee, Townshend’s tea and Crema pastries. Gabriel’s provides the bagels. You can order a pourover or grab a quick cup of French press coffee from the air pot. Each table has an outlet next to it, making See See a suitable location for spending time working on your computer.

The café has only been open for a few weeks, and it still smells new.  The adjoining motorcycle shop is scheduled to open in the next week, so if you want to check out the motorcycle shop too, wait a couple days before heading in.

Vitals
Address: 1642 NE Sandy (map)
Phone: 503-894-9566
Hours: Monday-Friday 7am-8pm
            Saturday-Sunday 8am-6pm
Coffee: Stumptown
Free Wi-Fi? Yes
Recommendations? Go there on your Harley, if you have one
Website: seeseemotorcycles.com

Trailhead Coffee opens its first cafe

Just a few blocks from See See Motorcycles, Trailhead Coffee Roasters has also opened a small café in the last couple weeks. Sharing a space with the roasting machine and coffee warehouse, the café area is very small. It is geared more toward giving the public an opportunity to sample Trailhead coffees than to give them a place to sit down.

One thing that makes Trailhead unique is the company’s strong association with bicycles. A couple years ago, Trailhead Coffee was featured in The Oregonian for supplying coffee for Cycle Oregon. Owner Charlie Wicker rode his 110-lb. cargo bike more than 300 miles, over a course with 6000 feet of elevation change, rising early each day to supply fellow riders with coffee.  Trailhead also delivers all its coffee to the urban core of Portland via bicycle. The goal is to reduce the environmental footprint of the coffee.

Most of Trailhead’s coffee comes from Café Femenino, a non-profit cooperative of women coffee farmers. The company also supports KIVA microfinance through the sales of some of its coffees. Wicker said he was inspired to support women coffee producers by the book Banker to the Poor, by Muhamad Yunus. The programs help grow the economies of villages in developing countries by providing loans and business help to the women.

In addition to selling fresh-roasted coffees, Wicker also sells some of his older inventory at a discount.   If you don’t mind drinking coffee that is a month old, you can pick up a 12-oz. bag of beans for $5. Fresh coffee is better, but I understand that sometimes price matters more than freshness. 

The shop’s featured brew method is the “dual pourover,” a side-by-side comparison of two different coffees brewed fresh at the same time using Hario V60 glass drippers.  You can expand your coffee palate and learn more about the regional differences between coffees. I tried the Colombia Los Naranjos and the Ethiopia Sidama. The Colombia stood out for its cherry and orange flavors and the Ethiopia for its complex, wine-like flavors (it’s a natural-processed coffee).

Vitals
Address: 1847 E Burnside, Portland, OR (map)
Hours: Monday-Friday 9am-2pm
Wi-Fi? No
Recommendations? Side by side pourovers
Website: http://www.trailheadcoffeeroasters.com/

Aliviar Coffee moves to Sandy Boulevard

Aliviar Coffee has a new location. The café, serving Batdorf and Bronson coffee, moved from Northeast 42nd to 41^st and Sandy, in a space adjacent to the Hollywood Theater.  The new spot has more space (seating approximately 25 people) and a more visible location. The hours have changed some too. The café now stays open until 9pm on Friday and Saturday evenings to catch Portlanders who come to the Hollywood District for the nightlife.

Vitals

Address:  4128 NE Sandy, Portland, OR (map) 
Hours: Monday-Thursday 6:45am-5pm
            Friday 6:45am-9pm
            Saturday 7:45am-9pm
            Sunday 7:45am-5pm
Recommendations? The multi-grain bagel, toasted with cream cheese, if you’re hungry (as I was when I arrived)
Wi-Fi? Yes
Website: http://www.aliviarcoffee.com/

Links (and laughs?) for June 24

A few links to help you waste time this Friday...

Entrepreneur has a long article on Stumptown founder Duane Sorenson in its latest issue. link

If you are interested in coffee, social media, website design and driving traffic, you might read the following story from the New York Times. The Times “You’re the Boss” blog explores why a company in Colorado isn’t getting much traffic. I bet it gets a lot this week…link

Kitsap County, Washington, has become a popular place for topless espresso stands, but that might change soon thanks to proposed regulation. One of the proposals is to limit all patrons of the kiosks to people over 18. link

In other news, every sophomore and junior boy in the Kitsap high schools just threatened to never drink coffee again…

The latest hotbed for quality coffee is. . . . Detroit? Apparently. link

The Seattle Times’ Melissa Allison details the resurgence of Starbucks in a recent post. link

This next link is only a press release, but if I were opening a coffee shop, I would have to look into selling “Weasel Premium Coffee” (if only for the name). I mean, who doesn’t “love their weasel?” link

If you are worried about a caffeine addiction (or even if you aren’t worried), you might watch this video about the history and benefits of coffee consumption. link

The best quote from an article in the Christian Science Monitor about coffee prices comes from a coffee roaster, who hopes that “somebody is going to lose their shirt” by speculating on coffee futures. link

Speaking of coffee prices, coffee consumption in China is expected to increase 15-20% each year. The average Chinese consumer drinks three cups of coffee per year, which means that the country has along way to go before it reaches the average of 240 cups per year. As consumption increases, so will the competition for beans. link

And finally, from Southeast Portland, some woodshop humor:

Everybody could use a free hole...

Caffeinated links for June 3, 2011

Here are the links for the week. They come with lots of sunshine and warm weather (hooray!), so enjoy:

From the legal department: a woman is suing Dunkin’ Donuts for putting sugar in her coffee. A legal liaison for DD was quoted as saying: "If you fail to request a sugar substitute, we can't read your mind. We sell doughnuts, not crystal balls." Ouch. link

Groupon, who filed paperwork this week for a $750 million IPO, had better look out. Google Offers debuted this week with a successful sale of over 1600 $10-vouchers (at a price of $3) for Portland’s own Floyd’s Coffee. Floyd’s is known for having outlets at all its tables, as well as serving Stumptown Coffee. link

Speaking of Stumptown—in case you missed it, here’s the NY Times article about the PDX-based coffee roaster’s expansion plans. link

On the same day that he published the rumor about Stumptown’s alleged sale to TSG, La Colombe’s Todd Carmichael was the subject of a feature in the Philadelphia Inquirer. La Colombe is investing in the revival of the Hatian coffee industry. link

In a contrarian move, Nectar of Life is lowering the prices for its Coffee of the Month club. link

McDonald’s, the coffee giant (what, you didn’t know?), is apologizing to Australians for the sorry state of the coffee the chain serves and is promising to do better. link

Another one from the legal department: Peet’s is being sued by Aegis, its development partner for the New York City market, who claims that Peet’s is trying to cut it out of the deals it had secured for the coffee company. link

Sumitomo Metal is going to buy used coffee grounds to fuel one of its power plants in Japan. The company isn’t going to use a lot, mixing 1% coffee with 99% coal, but it’s a start. link

Coffee juice, anyone? Coffee fruit flavor might be the next new fad in the cold beverage market. link

And finally:

Beginning August 1^st, if you visit the Oregon Convention Center, you will be able to drink coffee at Portland Roasting Coffee’s first signature café. The venue dropped Starbucks and switched to the Portland company because of Portland Roasting’s commitment to sustainability. link

Coffee, Rumor and Innuendo

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Last Friday, I posted a link to what I said was a sign of the impending rapture—that Stumptown Coffee was in negotiations to be bought out by Starbucks. There was absolutely no truth to the rumor whatsoever, so you can imagine the surprise I felt today when I went online to read the latest coffee news and one of the first things to come up was a story claiming that Stumptown had been sold (though not to Starbucks).

Todd Carmichael, the founder of LaCombe Torrefaction, an East Coast-based coffee company, wrote an article for Esquire that Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson had “sold his life’s work to the highest bidder.” Needless to say, this caused quite a stir in the coffee blogosphere and Twittersphere. Could it really be that Stumptown, Portland’s most famous coffee company who seemed to be everything but corporate, could be ‘selling out?’ What would that mean for Portlanders who cannot stand the idea of supporting a “corporate” coffee company? The idea seemed an anathema to many people.

There were several reasons to be skeptical about the article’s accuracy. Carmichael likes to make fun of the hipster coffee culture, as evidenced by this article, so it is not surprising that he took a shot at Stumptown. Also, the tone of the article and lack of evidence in it, lead one to believe that Carmichael, whose company is a direct competitor to Stumptown, does not like the fact that Stumptown is expanding on the East Coast and was looking for a way to give his rival some bad publicity among the anti-corporate crowd.

In response to the news, Willamette Weekly dug up a document showing that Stumptown Coffee Corporation, which is a separate entity from Stumptown Coffee Roasters, did apply for an  amendment to authority with the Oregon Secretary of State at the end of April. The new agent for the company is Alexander Panos, a managing director at TSG Consumer Partners, a private equity firm based in New York. In other words, there was a small bit of evidence behind the rumors.

However, the document does not address any questions about any relationship between Stumptown and TSG. It is impossible to tell from that document what Stumptown’s plans are, and Carmichael’s speculation is premature, unless he has other information. Esquire, if it wants to be taken seriously, needs to make sure there is more evidence before an article like this is published, especially when the author has a financial stake in a rival company.

Update: In the latest news this afternoon, also from the Willamette Weekly, Stumptown responded to the article, saying that it did open itself up to some outside investment to help fund its expansion, but that Duane Sorenson, Stumptown’s founder, is still in charge. Therefore, Portlanders can relax—Stumptown has not sold out. You do not have to worry about losing another local chain to corporate America.

Update 2 (June 2): Stumptown did allow for some investment by Panos (Sorenson still controls the company) and the plan is to expand into Chicago and San Francisco. The NY Times has the story here.

Update 3 (June 6): Willamette Weekly is today reporting that Stumptown sold 90% of the company to TSG, though it seems like the source is Carmichael. It's hard to know what to believe. . . You can read the story here.

My question is, if Stumptown had sold out, so what? It is Sorenson’s company, after all, and the last time I checked, we still live in the USA, where capitalism is the economic system. If someone wants to build a company and sell it so that he or she can fulfill other dreams, that should be his or her right. There is nothing especially noble about starting a company and staying with it until you die. Times and people change—we have to accept it. Unless, of course, the news is just a rumor or a blogger’s attempt to be funny.