Ristretto Couch – A Beautiful Blend of Form and Function

Near the end of July, I visited Ristretto’s new café, at the corner of Northeast Couch and 6th. At the time, the café was still under construction and the workers were frenetically working to finish the build-out. You couldn’t really tell what the café was going to look like. I finally made it back to see the café, and all I can say is, wow.

With shapely steel and bamboo tables, Ristretto Couch is another example of Accelerated Development’s faculty for design, elevating the industrial look to an art form. I didn’t think anything could trump Ristretto’s Nicolai space, but Couch comes close. (Apparently, I’m not the only one who was impressed. New York Magazine’s Grub Street blog included Ristretto on its list of 58 Extraordinary Shops Around America.)

It is not just beauty that makes the new café enjoyable. The coffee is good too. The barista pulled a very nice shot of espresso (Beaumont  Blend)—sweet, smooth, almondy* and chocolaty.

Steampunk, modified.

The customized Steampunk is another reason to check out the cafe. A technological curiosity, the Steampunk is kind of like a vacuum pot, kind of like a Clover, and kind of like a French press. Mostly, it’s just kind of unique. It is a fully automatic brewer that can be programmed to mimic all kinds of brew methods.

The Steampunk, from the backThe barista can control many different  brewing parameters, including water temperature, agitation (frequency, strength), and brew time.

Action shotRistretto is the only café in the Northwest to have one so far, so if you are interested in trying coffee brewed this way, Couch is the place to get it. (I tried the Ethiopia Yirgacheffe on the Steampunk. It was a bit more roasty than some of Ristretto’s coffees I have tried. It opened up as it cooled, with some sweetness and a mild acidity coming through.)

Getting ready to serveNew for Ristretto, the Couch shop sells several beers and wines, as well as some food options beyond the typical morning pastry fare. The tapas plate, with bread and olive oil, Marcona almonds, and green olives was tasty (though at $10, a bit pricy to be a regular habit). You can add prosciutto from Olympic provisions for a heartier meal.

Artful

The café is roomy enough that both workflow and customer flow should be smooth, as long as people don’t stop too long to gawk at the Steampunk. Overall, Ristretto Couch is a great addition to the PDX coffee scene.

Vitals
Address: 555 NE Couch Street, Portland, OR 97232 (map)
Phone: 503-284-6767
Hours: Monday-Saturday 6:30am-8pm
Sunday 7am-6pm
Coffee: Ristretto
Wi-Fi? Yes
Recommendations? A shot of Beaumont Blend
Recommendation #2: Check out the W.C. (seriously)
Website: RistrettoRoasters.com

 

*My spell checker didn’t like almondy, but I didn’t like almond-y, so I’m going with it.

Hamptons Lane’s Coffee Quiz – What’s Your Style?

If you enjoy regularly trying new coffees, but lack the time to search high and wide for new roasters, one option you have is to sign up for a coffee subscriptions service, and let someone else find the coffees for you. One relatively new company that provides this service is Hamptons Lane.* But how do the people at Hamptons Lane know which coffees to send you?

When you first visit the company’s site, you are encouraged to take a short survey about what types of foods/beverages you like. Based on your answers, the company assigns you a profile and sends you a sampler box with four different coffees that it thinks you will like. After the first month, you can continue to receive the samplers or pick the coffees you want, delivered to your door. I haven’t seen any Portland roasters on the site yet, but there are several from the West Coast.

The survey is kind of fun to take, and while I’m not sure how accurate it will be for everybody, this is the profile it assigned me:

Can't argue with that...

 

*I profiled another company that provides coffee subscriptions, Misto Box, several months ago. Since then, its owners went on ABC’s Shark Tank and received $75,000 from Mark Cuban to fund the company’s growth. 

Cupping Guatemala at Water Avenue

After three weeks away for harvest, I returned to Portland last Thursday evening. To my dismay, the bus pulled into town in the middle of a big rainstorm. Ugh, I thought, not already—September is way too early for the gray season to return. (Fortunately, the sun has since come back and it appears summer will linger for a few more weeks.) Worries about winter weather notwithstanding, my mood was lightened considerably Friday morning by attending a cupping at Water Avenue Coffee. Brandon Smyth, Water Avenue’s co-owner and head roaster, recently returned from a buying trip to Guatemala, and he shared some of his new discoveries with a group that included Jannie Huang and Chelsea Broussard, both from Little Green Pickle, Zachary Carlsen, from Sprudge.com, Fabiola, from Not Just Baked, and someone from Imbibe (I didn’t catch her name).The table, ready to cup. Photo courtesy Chelsea Broussard, Little Green Pickle.

Brandon put several cups of five different coffees on the table and walked us through each of them. The first coffee we slurped was a yellow maracaturra variety from Finca San Jorge, run by Tulio Osberto Lemus Pinedo and his son, Tulio. The maracaturra is a cross between the maragogype and caturra varieties. When Smyth visited the farm, he noticed the maracaturra growing by itself in one area and convinced Tulio to separate it out from the rest of his coffees. Finca San Jorge only produced 600lbs. of maracaturra beans this year, and Smyth bought the entire lot, recognizing its potential.

The maracaturra stood out for its sweetness, both in aroma and in pre-roast sugar content. Brandon told me that a quality green coffee typically has a sugar content around 25%, as measured by a brix meter. The maracaturra ran about 30%, a significantly higher number. Brewed, the maracaturra was sweet and syrupy, with a very mellow acidity and heavy body.

Next, we cupped a yellow caturra, also from Finca San Jorge. Smyth described it as more of a “coffee” coffee, with flavors most people associate with coffee, including lots of chocolate notes. One of the cups especially stood out for its dry fragrance, full of sweet brown sugar and raisin notes.

The star of the table was the third coffee, a red caturra from Finca Santa Isabel, owned by the Valdez family, in the Cobán region. The coffee, which Smyth scored at 90+ points (very high), had the brightness and complexity of a Kenyan coffee, with rich fruit notes that reminded me of pie cherries and rhubarb. According to Brandon, coffees from Cobán are not usually this good—there must have been something that happened with the weather, or maybe the perfect fermentation conditions that turned the coffee into something almost magical.

Our fourth coffee was a red bourbon from Finca Huixoc in Huehuetenango. Finca Huixoc won awards at the Cup of Excellence in both 2006 and 2009. The coffee was a little earthier than I expected. Smyth said it was the coffee’s first roast, and he was still in the process of nailing it down.

The fifth and final coffee had an interesting twist. First, it was from El Salvador (Finca Manzano) instead of Guatemala. Second, before the coffee was roasted, the beans had been allowed to age for a couple months inside an oak barrel that previously held pinot noir wine. Aging inside the barrel gave the coffee a distinct, winy aroma and cherry flavor. The resulting coffee was quite interesting to cup, and its uniqueness would make an interesting topic of conversation if you served it at a dinner party. 

Friday’s cupping, in addition to being a nice ‘welcome back’ to Portland coffee, taught me a few things about the differences within a country. Often, we hear the name of a coffee origin—Colombian, Guatemalan, Costa Rican, etc.—and immediately make assumptions about how the coffees should taste. This cupping, however, demonstrated the limitations of that way of thinking. Within a country, region, or even farm, the coffees produced can be quite distinctive, and the different types of coffee varieties also contribute to these differences. Lesson learned. 

The Portland Coffee Book

For the last few months, the frequency of posts on Caffeinated PDX has been kind of slow, because I have been putting my energies into writing a book (working title: Are You Serious? It’s Just Coffee…Right?  Why Portland’s Third Wave Coffee Scene is Way More than ‘Just Coffee’). I am happy to report that I finished the manuscript in the middle of August, and am now working with Indigo Editing and Publications to get it ready for publishing. It is exciting to have someone to collaborate with on the project, and I am looking forward to releasing the book early next year.

Originally, the plan was to publish it just before Christmas, but in the book industry, the two main seasons for book releases are spring and fall. To have the book ready for November would compromise quality, so I decided to wait instead of rushing out a poor-quality book.Today's post fueled by shots of espresso at Albina Press Hawthorne

Despite the wait, I am excited to share the book with you. Part guidebook, part history of Portland coffee, and part personal memoir, Are You Serious? includes many profiles of the people and companies that make Portland’s coffee special. Inside, I give a brief history of coffee, then delve into the Portland coffee story, putting it in context with what has happened in the specialty coffee industry over the last decade and a half. Mixed in are several personal stories of how I became a coffee nerd. Some the stories included are edited versions of past blog posts, but most of the information is new. Over the last year, I interviewed a wide variety of coffee roasters, café owners, baristas, and other coffee people around the area, to hear their stories and discover why Portland coffee is so highly regarded around the country.

The specialty coffee industry is exploding, with new roasters and cafés popping up every day in cities all over the U.S. The entire coffee industry has undergone some big changes over the last fifteen years, and while every city is unique, we can better understand these changes by taking a look at what has happened in Portland. I especially recommend Are You Serious? for anyone who wants to understand specialty coffee and for people who want to know Portland better. If you like Portland or its coffee, the book should be a treat to read.

Why did I decide to write a book? I’ve asked myself that question more than once. Overall, though, the writing experience has been a good one. Once I learned a little bit about coffee—peeked behind the curtain, so to speak—I found it interesting enough to keep learning a little more, which led to more discoveries, and so on. Soon, coffee was nearly an obsession. (I say ‘nearly’ because I’m still mostly on the sidelines of the industry—the people who actually work in coffee are the ones obsessed with coffee. I just tried to capture their passion and help others understand it.) In addition, writing a book fits my personality. I enjoy delving deeply into things and focusing on them. The subject of coffee provides many avenues to do that. Finally, I admit that part of the reason I’m publishing the book is for the sense of accomplishment that comes with it.

Over the next few months I will keep you up to date on the book’s progress. When it’s ready to go, I’ll be sure to let you know that too. If you are interested in helping spread the word about the book, drop me a line and we’ll talk more about how you can do that.

Also, you will soon see some changes to the Caffeinated PDX website, to make it more reader-friendly and better organized. I may broaden the scope of topics a bit too, while keeping coffee as the primary subject. Since the bulk of work on the book is finished, I plan to post here more frequently—generally twice a week, as long as I can find interesting things to write about. (I am always looking for article ideas, so feel free to send them in.) September’s articles will include a post about a cupping Guatemalan coffees at Water Avenue, as well as the story of Nossa Familia extending the ‘familia’ into countries besides Brazil.

To get those stories out, I must get back to writing. Happy Monday.