Tale of Two Cities

Saturday was an unexpected surprise in many ways. We woke up and went straight for (you guessed it) coffee at a place called Good Coffee. They serve their espresso drinks in small glasses instead of mugs, which was kind of fun and very delicious. I had a special drink called a cortado, which is a Spanish espresso drink served with steamed milk and sugar. Nadene had a latté and we also ordered a scone and banana walnut muffin. Everything here was quite good and the barista was also another Colorado native! She went to CSU and lived in Boulder for awhile. That's two CO representatives in the Portland coffee business we've met so far! 

We woke up a little late on Saturday and had to rush to get coffe at Good Coffee before our scheduled roastery tour at Stumptown Coffee Roasters. You may remember them from a previous blog posting involving cold brewed nitro coffee. We were so excited to tour this place and try some more of their coffees.

Stumptown has multiple locations throughout Portland, but we ended up going to a place they call the Annex, which is essentially where they roast their coffee with a small coffee bar for tastings which they do every day at 3:00pm as a free service for the public. They invite anyone who wants to come taste their coffee to the Annex for discussion about coffee. It's sort of like a wine tasting, but with coffee. This place was really nice and a lot of fun. We started at the coffee bar with our tour guide and sampled 3 coffees he had just brewed. They were all really good and he gave us the history behind each one. Stumptown buys their coffee through what they call "direct trade" instead of fair trade - this means that they work with the coffee farmers directly and there is less money exchanging hands before the farmers and coffee pickers are paid. This allows the workers to gain more money for their hard work and creates a relationship between the farmers and Stumptown. 

After the tastings, we traveled through the building to the training room where each employee in their coffee shops goes to learn how to make their coffee consistent every time. Even the employees at businesses where Stumptown sells their coffee such as restaurants, other coffee shops, hotels, etc. has to go through training in this building to make sure the product is perfect every time. I would love to just spend days here and make all kinds of coffee!

We then went to the roasting room, where we met a guy who walked us through the roasting process. As the coffee roasted, he would pull some out every now and then to let the tour group smell the beans and look at the color. He roasted for about 15 minutes and you could smell and see the difference each time he pulled out a sample.

After learning about roasting, we were taken into the cupping room where each roast is carefully tasted by professionals to make sure that the coffees have the desired quality before sending them out to be packaged and sold. The whole process was really interesting and fun, and by the time we were done with the tour, the roaster had bagged up 1/2 pound bags of the very beans we saw him roasting and everyone got a free bag! We cannot wait to get home and try this stuff!

The tour was a lot of fun and we went from there to grab some lunch at Bunk Sandwiches, which has been on the Food Network. If you read our last road trip blog about Canada, you know that we love the Food Network and we go to places that have been featured there any time we get a chance. This place had a great Cubano sandwich and roast beef sandwich that we had been told were the reason to go. Sure enough, they were both incredible and made the perfect send off for us to travel north to Seattle for the rest of the day!

We hadn't really planned to go to Seattle due to our limitation on time, but we figured we were so close we had to make at least a quick stop so we spent Saturday afternoon and night there. We took I-5 up to the city and our first stop was the popular Pike Place Market by the bay. It was SO crowded here but ended up being really fun. All the seafood vendors had their fish and shellfish out on display and we stopped in little shops along the way. 

We made our way to a restaurant called Lowell's which overlooks the Elliott Bay just to the west. It was a beautiful view and we dined on crab cakes, salmon, and shrimp. 

Needing something sweet to finish off the night we headed downtown to a place called RN74 because it's the only place we could find with beignets, which Nadene was really craving for some reason. I'm so glad she was because this place had some of the best we've had. They were served with a salted caramel sauce with a 12 year Macallan butterscotch sauce on the bottom. So good! Perfectly chewy and sweet. Once the beignets were gone we just ate the sauce by the spoonful, it was that good!

You can tell I was pretty excited about these...

After desert, we figured we'd do one more cup of coffee to end the night since we drove all this way. Victrolla Coffee Roasters is supposed to be one of the best in the city, so that's exactly where we headed. This place has a really neat atmosphere with seats by the windows so you can look out at the city. The drip coffee here is only made by French press, which is exactly the way we like it! 

This was our final stop before we headed to our Seattle hotel and called it a day. We packed a lot in today, but the coffee rush is not over yet. Until next time, cheers!

Caleb & Nadene

Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee, Let's Have Another Piece of Fish

The older that I get, the harder it seems to get out of bed in the morning when I'm camping. One could say it's the peaceful tranquility that comes from being outdoors and longing to stay in the sleeping bag listening to the birds chirp outside or the rain dancing on the top of the tent. But if I'm being candid, what really makes it difficult to rise from my slumber when camping is that my back just doesn't want to work anymore. Making any sort of movement on those mornings proves to be rather difficult, and Friday morning was no different, though the setting was certainly easy to wake up to. We heard the sound of the waves crashing on the ocean and the light dripping of dew from the trees on top of us as we awoke, and the entire forrest was covered with a morning mist that was simply breathtaking. 

As we packed up our camp and said goodbye to the beach, we headed up the west coast to visit a well-known lighthouse at Cape Meares, just a 25 minute drive north of where we camped. We stopped in a little town called Oceanside on the way for some coffee and breakfast. This place is basically on the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean, and I don't even know the name of the restaurant we walked into, but I'm sure glad we came. I was worried at first because the place seemed a little run down and there were visible spider webs hanging from various places throughout the dining room. The waitress came and took our order as we sat at a table with a window overlooking the water. The coffee tasted a little like fish (I would think most things do in this town), which is not what we were expecting, but we gave them the benefit of the doubt on that one; we knew not to expect great coffee on our excursion up the coast. My favorite breakfast of all time is eggs benedict. There is something so great about the crunchy English muffin paired with ham, a runny egg, and a delicious hollandaise sauce that is a perfect marriage on a plate! One of the specials at this place was a crab benedict, served on cibatta bread. After tasting the fishy coffee, I was very skeptical, but when you're on the beach, you have to give this a shot, right? It was one of the best benedicts I've ever had in my life! The crab comes from a local seafood market and was caught nearby. The buttery hollendaise paired perfectly with the fresh crab, because what goes better with crab than butter? Nadene had a breakfast sandwich, but kept sneaking bites of my food throughout the entire meal. I couldn't blame her either - something that delicious was meant to be shared! 

We had a fun time at breakfast and drove through the little town of Oceanside afterward. We then headed up to Cape Meares to see the lighthouse. The drive up was beautiful with amazing views of the ocean all along the way. We parked the car in the parking lot on top of the hill that led to the lighthouse and there was one other car parked that morning. A short hike down the hill, and we came upon a beautiful little lighthouse with wide sweeping views of the ocean! It was such a sweet moment looking out at the rocks and houses on the cliffs on the south side. There was another gentlemen there at the lighthouse when we approached. None of us said a word as we gazed at the beauty before us, we just stood in silence and took in the views. I could go on, but words won't really do justice to what we saw there. It was a pretty cool experience.

After spending some time at Cape Mears, we headed back to Portland for the rest of the day. We went straight to a place called Courier Coffee Roasters, which started out in the late 90s as a bike coffee delivery service. In 2010, they opened up their own storefront and serve their own coffee there. We had a pour over, latté, and one of their homemade chocolate chip cookies. It was all excellent! The local conversation throughout the small shop was fun to listen in on as well!

A few days earlier, we scheduled a tour and tasting with Portland Roasting company for Friday afternoon, so after coffee at Courier, we headed to Northeast Portland for a tour of the facility. We were the only people on the tour, so it was a bit awkward. It was just us and a tour guide who seemed very nervous about being there as if she had never done this before. She showed us the cupping room where the tasters for the company decide on different coffees to purchase from farms all over the world, and she took us back to the roasting room, which smelled so good! At the end of the short tour we had a chance to sample some of the coffees, including a couple of roasts they make from Guatemala, which is our favorite! 

After getting recommendations from the staff there, we headed over to Southpark Seafood in downtown Portland, which ended up being a great cap to the rest of the day. We had a variety board that included pork belly pastrami, foie gras, and a French comte cheese. All of these are things we're not very familiar with, but each thing we tried was just excellent! The restaurant was very Portland! If you've ever watched Portlandia, this is the exact kind of thing that is made fun of all the time. The food here was certified by the aquarium in town as being responsibly harvested in a way that was more environmentally friendly and some other stuff. I don't know exactly what the guy told us, but I think our fish's name was Calvin and he had been raised in a free environment. Though some of the things seem a little overboard to me, I cannot argue with the quality and deliciousness of the food! Everything we had here was amazing. For the main dish we had a piece of sole fish that was stuffed with a prawn mousse with capers and a salad of pickled green beans, pickled onions, grilled asparagus, and arugala. It reminded us of the "we can pickle that" sketch from Portlandia. What an experience! As you can see, the building is quite unique as well.

We're having a blast up here in the Northwest. We'll be writing more along the way as we continue our journey through Portland and make a stop over in Seattle toward the end of the week. Keep up with us as we continue the search for great coffee on the West Coast! Until next time, cheers!

Caleb & Nadene

Best Camp Coffee Ever

This Thursday our trip took us to the coast of Oregon where we camped by the beach and visited the Tillamook Cheese Factory in Tillamook, OR. We had a delightful day as we started at Heart Coffee Roasters in downtown Portland. The owner of Heart won the national aeropress championship in 2013 and we were hoping to get a taste of what makes his coffee so great. Unfortunately, they don't make aeropress coffee at the location we visited, but the latté and drip brew we tried were excellent!

The gentleman you see behind the espresso machine is actually from Boulder, CO! Not sure of his name, so we'll just call him Steve. Steve was an incredibly nice guy who found his home away from the Rocky Mountains and in the trees, as he stated. The location of this shop was perfect as it was right across the street from a little place called Tasty and Alder, which ended up being the perfect place for brunch after coffee.

Everything at Tasty and Alder was a delicious adventure. Starting with the perfectly crispy chocolate potato doughnuts with creme anglaise we were so impressed! The potatoes bravas were potatoes cooked in wagu beef fat with two over-easy eggs and a garlic aioli. Great flavor on this dish, and afterward we were served something called The Whole Toad. This was like a savory bread pudding with a poached egg in the middle that when broken was cooked by the rest of the food in the bowl. The whole meal was incredible!

After brunch, we made the trek from Portland to Tillamook where we stopped at the Tillamook Cheese Factory. We had a chance to see workers slicing, and packaging cheese right on the assembly line. The best part was the sample line they had at the end of the tour. Full confession, we went through three times. And I'll say this, the cheddar with garlic and chili pepper was the best cheese we've had in a while! If you ever find this in the grocery store, pick it up because you are in for a treat!

Oh yeah...and then there was the ice cream!

After one more trip through the sample line, we headed out to the coast for camping at the beach. We stayed at Cape Lookout and had no sooner set up out tent than it started raining... perfect timing! It was still fun to walk on the beach and enjoy the beautiful scenery and it was a peaceful break from the city. Of course, we still needed great coffee so we brought some Stumptown cold brew. Stump town cans their cold brew nitro with a widget in the bottom for a great creamy pour and the carton is their cold brew with chocolate milk. Pretty great camp coffee!

This day was a really fun adventure together and a peaceful break from the hustle of the city. The next day we went back to Portland for more coffee and great food, but that's another post. Until next time, cheers.

Caleb & Nadene

Coava and Stumptown

Wednesday was quite the coffee day for us here in Portland. Our first stop was Coava Coffee Roasters on the Northeast side of the city for a fantastic pour-over and a latté. This particular location was featured in one of our favorite TV shows: Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which is what the title of this blog is based on. In the show, comedian Jerry Seinfeld chooses other comedians to take a ride in a classic car as they travel to a local coffee shop for great conversation. Recently, Seinfeld invited SNL alum and star of Portlandia (another one of our favorite shows), Fred Armisen, to the show and Coava was his choice for coffee. You can watch the episode by clicking here, along with a clip of what makes Portlandia so great. Coava uses a stainless steel filter they designed for the pour-over, which eliminates the filtered taste that comes from a normal paper filter. Their espresso was quite tasty as well.

You can tell Nadene was thoroughly enjoying the moment…

We asked the guy behind the counter if he could direct us to a good place for breakfast in the area, and he recommended Pine State Biscuits, which turned out to be one of the best places we’ve ever eaten biscuits. We got a biscuit sandwich that included fried chicken, bacon, cheddar cheese, and apple butter! It was so great that we’ll have to go back for another one later this week. The coffee here was from a local roaster called Stumptown Coffee, which we visted later in the day, but even the drip coffee they had available here was excellent.

The afternoon was full of great surprises. We walked down Mississippi St. in downtown Portland to discover Blue Star Doughnuts and Ecliptic Brewing. These were both a must for us as we snagged a maple bacon doughnut and indulged in the red ale and porter at the brewery. We had a nice walk along Mississippi and then decided it was time for more coffee.

We had heard of Stumptown Coffee from a number of sources calling it one of the best places for coffee in all of Portland. One of the things that makes this place so unique in our eyes is the cold brew coffee recipe they have created. Not only do they make cold brew, but they have it on tap at most of their locations. Not only do they have it on tap, but they also have a nitro version on tap as well. This nitrogenates the brew, making it very rich and creamy on top (see the video below for the full effect)! It was by far the most delicious cold brew we have ever tasted! They even sell their cold brew in a can with a nitrogen widget just like you would find in a can of Guinness, as well as in the paper milk cartons with regular or chocolate milk added. This place knows how to please when it comes to iced coffee!

After the lovely cold brew, we retired to our hotel, but not before traveling through Powell’s City of Books just down the street. This place is a 3 story book store that engulfs an entire block on Burnside St. You could get lost in this place for days, and it is pretty amazing to walk through. We had coffee later in this place at the end of the day while playing cards at one of the café tables. Great fun.

This was a spectacular day for great coffee and food. We’ll continue to post about our travels and coffee adventures as we make our way to the coast and back in the next few days. Until next time, cheers! Caleb & Nadene P.S. - Favorite sign ever. They really like literal signs...