On Coffee: A Portland Declaration

Around these parts, people take their coffee with absolute seriousness. This leads to a certain amount of pretension and posturing - something I've been guilty of since high school. But let's be honest: most of us do not have any real expertise to distinguish between, say, excellent coffee and really excellent coffee. Hence my Portland declaration: We should just drink what we like.

If only it were that easy.

I recently sent Jeff to a barista class at Clive Coffee, an exemplar of the Portland coffee scene. Clive doesn't sell coffee, they sell the coffee experience - by which I mean $70 old-fashioned coffee mills so you can grind your coffee by hand, $65 Japanese water kettles so you can pour your water with precision, and $170 stands crafted from salvaged wood for your conical filter and glass beaker (to replace your $5 plastic coffee filter holder and freebie mug). I'm actually not being cynical here - this stuff is beautiful. But it's nothing you need, and in that sense reminds me of the Japanese tea ceremony: the beauty of the form becomes as important as the quality of the final product.

Clive also sells $5000 home espresso machines, which then necessitates classes to teach the new owners how to use them. I just thought it would be interesting to learn how to pull a shot. So off Jeff goes, and he brings back this story.

At the outset, the barista-instructor pulled a shot of espresso and tasted it. "Mmmm," he said. "That's good." Then he passed it around to the four students. The first three concurred: this was the good stuff. Jeff was last.

Jeff's first thought: "I don't even drink the communion wine at church, and you want me to revel in four strangers' backwash?" Jeff's second thought: "This tastes like a particularly sour lemon." Jeff says, "Oh. I don't think this tastes good." Everyone laughs, but it wasn't a joke.

My point: Way to go, Jeff! A $5000 machine does not guarantee a transcendant coffee experience, just like a two-hour-long wait doesn't guarantee a transcendent brunch experience or a triple-dose of local hops doesn't guarantee a transcendent microbrew (in truth, it never does). We should be honest with ourselves and drink what we like.

Consider also Jeff's personal mission to score a "real" cappuccino in Portland. In Portland, people love foam art. You know, the leaf/heart/tree/flower that skilled baristas can shape through precision pours of "microfoam." Problem is, foam art is not conducive to old-fashioned cappuccinos - the kind with thick foam you can stand a spoon up in. Baristas' solution: insist that microfoam coffee art does a cappuccino make. Yes, that means a cappuccino is pretty much the same as a latte, but only plebeians insist on a dry cappuccino, and plebeians' requests are easy to ignore. So foam art it is.

This is, however, a good problem to have, this imbibing pretension, because it's a symptom of having wine/beer/coffee worth being pretentious about. Our collective standards here in Portland are high, and human beings generally don't want to end up on the wrong side of public opinion, so we reach imbibing consensuses that sometimes miss the bigger picture: we should like what we drink, especially when we have so many high-quality products to choose from. 

That's all I have to say about that. Here are a few of my favorite coffee drinking establishments, plebeian though I am, for those passing through Portland and seeking something beyond Starbucks.

Barista: The store on Alberta is my current favorite coffee shop in Portland because it is so Portland. The coffee can be exquisite (advanced foam art, ahoy), and its decor nails 1890s hipster, complete with artisanal lightbulbs and wall-mounted taxidermy wearing Timbers soccer scarves. (Meanwhile, their Pearl District store nails the exposed-brick-light-industrial look. I appreciate their neighborhood-specific aesthetic.) Also important: it's a pleasant place to sit.

Extracto: I had the most beautiful espresso at their secondary location on Prescott. Unfortunately, not as pleasant as a place to hang out.

Water Avenue Coffee: I recently had a transcendent espresso experience here. It was so good, I had to restrain myself from jumping up and immediately ordering another. I also like the layout of their space, with a few different types of seating options. Conveniently located next to Clive.

Spella: Tiny storefront right in the middle of downtown that's hardly every open. Like many places around town, they roast their own coffee (one of our favorites), and they hand-pull their shots. It's a little slice of Italy, complete with European hours.

Stumptown: As they like to say on Portlandia, it's OVER! Except it's not. Stumptown is no longer "cool" or cutting edge, but it's still reliably good. I'm a fan. Their shop on Belmont is worth spending time in - and their nearby Annex, which serves only individually brewed cups of coffee (no espresso), pretty much started the whole individually brewed cup of coffee thing. It's worth a visit.