The Coffee Test (A cultural lesson on dating in Korea)

[Thanks to my friend, Ji-Yoon (Jade) Choi, another former Portlandian who moved back to Seoul, for telling me about this.]

One of the fun parts of traveling is that you get to learn about other cultures. Being in an unfamiliar place forces you to follow new patterns. If you are open-minded, you gain a better understanding of how other people see the world.

I learned several things that stretched my perspective while I was in Seoul (did I mention the lunch with squirming octopus chunks?). One interesting part of Korean culture I learned about is called the coffee test.

In Korea, coffee has become part of the dating ritual, at least among the younger generation. When young couples go out to dinner, they often follow up the meal with a trip to a café for coffee and/or dessert. When the pair goes out for the first time, this café visit can be a strong indicator of the future of the relationship.

Typically, the man pays for the couple’s dinner and the woman pays for the coffee. If the woman doesn’t like the man, however, she will make no move when it is time to pay for the coffee. When this happens, the man has failed the coffee test—he has the double misfortune of paying twice and of being rejected.

While this test is a rather indirect way of communicating lack of romantic interest, it is effective. Therefore, gentlemen, if you ever take a Korean woman out for coffee after dinner and she doesn’t pay the tab, you’re probably not the one she’s looking for.

You failed the coffee test.


Caffeinated Seoul

Last week, I went to Seoul, South Korea, to attend a friend’s wedding and participate in a reunion of sixteen present and former Portlandians (currently living in four different countries)—Gangnam style. The trip turned out to be a fantastic cultural, social and culinary experience. In between rounds of Korean barbecue, soju (a popular Korean spirit made from rice) and even some still-squirming raw octopus (not as bad as it sounds), I spent some time checking out the city’s coffee scene.

Compared to Portland, Seoul is huge. Actually, compared to most places, Seoul is huge. The city has more than ten million residents and the entire metro area has more than twice that. In most ways, Korea is as modern as the United States, and in some ways—the efficiency of its public transportation or its communication networks, for example—more developed. Seoul’s specialty coffee scene, though not quite as cutting edge as Portland’s, is growing rapidly, with more good coffee available to Koreans than ever before.

Korea is a very welcoming country, though the language barrier can sometimes be a challenge. My own Korean is limited to hello and thank you, but fortunately, I did not have to explore Seoul’s coffee on my own. Jinsu Lee, one of the team members who worked on our Caffe PDX project, organized the coffee tours. Cory Klatik, another team member, joined us for some of the coffee expeditions as well.

Prior to the trip, I knew coffee was very popular in Korea—this summer Reuters published an article that detailed how quickly the number of cafés has grown in Seoul. Regardless, the sheer volume of cafés shocked me. In some parts of the city, each block has three or four cafés. Sometimes they are literally next door or on top of one another.

One of Seoul's more interesting cafe iterations

 

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Caffe PDX – Read. Find. Drink. Smile.

One question people regularly ask me is, “Where should I go for coffee in Portland?” Sometimes I stumble over the answer, because Portland has so many good cafés. While I would like to send them to all my favorites, I usually just give them two or three suggestions. When the SCAA Event came to Portland earlier this year, for example, I put together a few coffee tour ideas for visitors.

To make life easier for Portland’s coffee explorers, a group of friends and I have been working on a side project called the Caffe PDX SmartMap. Located at caffepdx.com, the site is designed to make it easier for you to find the best cafés and coffee shops in Portland. It highlights thirty of our favorite cafés around the city. We visited the shops, took some pictures and wrote up some descriptions that capture the spirit of each one. Visit Caffe PDX’s About page to learn more about our team.

Caffe PDX - click the image to check it out

Our goal was not to list every café in the city (Google does that quite well already). Rather, we wanted to highlight cafés where we are confident you will get a good cup of coffee and a unique Portland experience. Ultimately, the plan is to create a mobile app that will put a café guide in your pocket, but that is still under development. If you sign up for email updates (right-hand sidebar, this page), I will let you know as soon as it is ready.

When you visit Caffe PDX, click on a café name or on one of the map pins to bring up a quick snapshot of the café. Click ‘More info’ to bring up larger photos and the full café description. Caffe PDX is still “in beta” (the tech people tell me that’s code for  the testing phase), so you might come across a bug or two that we will be weeding out over the next few weeks. Time permitting, we will also add more features and maybe a couple more cafés.

Use the site to plan a weekend coffee adventure with your friends. Share the site with others so they too can find good coffee. Drop us a line and let us know what you think. We’re always looking for ideas of how to improve things.

Most importantly, have fun exploring Portland and enjoy your coffee!

MistoBox – An easier way to find your favorite coffee


Each year, when the rains return to the Northwest, Portlanders hunker down, mug in hand, trying to stay dry while dreaming longingly about next year’s sunshine. To lessen the impact of the grayness, we medicate (er, indulge) ourselves with large quantities of coffee. Some people make their coffee at home, while others frequent their favorite café(s).

Fortunately, Portland’s variety of roasters and cafés is unsurpassed, meaning we never have to get bored drinking the same coffee over and over. In fact, we could probably drink a different coffee every day of the year without repeating ourselves.

That said, some people still want to try coffees from other cities or regions. For these coffee adventurers, the question is, where do you start looking? One place to begin your search would be the website of a new company called MistoBox. MistoBox is making it a little easier for you to sample coffees from around the country without ever leaving your city.

If you sign up with Misto Box, a “delightful” box arrives at your door at the beginning of every month, carrying four different samples of whole bean coffees from roasters around the country, from the Pacific Northwest (Portland’s Water Avenue Coffee is one) to as far away as Tennessee (for now—the company is continually adding more roasters to its lineup). The samples are small—1.5oz.-2oz., so you don’t have to worry about getting too much of a coffee that is not your favorite. If you especially enjoy one (or more) of the coffees inside the box, you can order a full-size bag of the beans from the MistoBox website. Customers earn points that can be redeemed for free coffee and other merchandise.

Samantha Meis and Connor Riley founded the company in January 2012 while they were finishing up their education at the University of Arizona. They created a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the company and once they reached their funding goal, took off like a caffeinated wildcat (pun-metaphor intended). I caught up with Samantha and asked her a few questions about the new venture (some answers have been edited for clarity).

Caffeinated PDX: Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got interested in coffee. 

Samantha Meis: I’m originally from a small city in Iowa where, as you could have guessed it, we didn’t have many options for drinking fresh roasted coffee. Actually, we didn’t have any options. My interest in coffee didn’t really start until I left for college in Tucson, Arizona. As it goes, coffee started out as a necessity for me, pulling me through some long all-nighters. Soon, I was visiting a local roasters’ shops daily, experimenting with different brewing techniques, and learning about coffee quality and evaluation. It was then I started my never-ending hunt for the perfect cup and a true addiction ensued.

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Coffee with a kick(start) - Nossa Familia's new campaign

Kickstarter is a relatively new company that allows small startups to harness the reach of the internet and connect with potential customers. Using Kickstarter, individuals or companies create proposals and seek pledges to support a specific project. In exchange for their “donations,” Kickstarter pledgers receive some sort of product or service from the campaigner. Each campaign has a specific goal and time period to reach that goal. If the funding goal is not met within the time period, the donors are not responsible for their pledge.

Kickstarter is not charity, nor is it an investment website. Kickstarter is a way for people to support a business project through pre-sales, similar to the way a CSA (community supported agriculture) works. You pay up front, then when the product is ready, you get what you paid for.

Why am I telling you about Kickstarter? Because I always advocate for improving the quality of coffee in this city. A local Portaland roaster, Nossa Familia, is currently running a campaign to raise money to put in an espresso bar at its new Pearl District headquarters. The company is looking to raise $15,000 to help purchase the equipment it needs to provide Portlandians with a Brazilian espresso experience.

The Nossa Familia campaign has several levels of support, ranging from the $5 level (an espresso + pão de queijo) to the $5,500 level (a guided trip for two to the Brazilian farms that produce the coffee Nossa Familia sells, not including airfare, a $600 discount from what the trip would normally cost).  

Augusto Carvalho Dias, Nossa Familia’s founder, can tell you more about it (video from Kickstarter website):

Best of luck to Nossa Familia in reaching its funding goal. Boa sorte!