Fantastic Friday Links-January 14, 2011

A coffee shop in Split, Croatia is giving customers free use of an iPad instead of handing out free newspapers. link

The Columbian (Vancouver, WA) visited Paper Tiger Coffee on the same day I did. Look for my take on the café early next week. link

The people’s republic of Ukiah, California is trying to keep chains out of its downtown. Bad news for fans of Starbucks and Peet’s. link

More bad news about 2011 coffee production—this time from Indonesia. You’d better be prepared to pay more for that cup. There’s not much good news out there. link

Starbucks fans will be eager to get their hands on Howard Schulz’s new book, coming out in March. I’m sure it will detail how he saved the company. link

Things are heating up because the espresso machine cooled down in Aspen, Colorado, where a barista is being sued for turning off the machine on his last day of work. The coffee shop missed an hour of business the next morning, and the owners are mad. link

A judge ruled that Nespresso did not copy Silodesign’s double-walled glass design. link

You can see a picture of Silodesign’s cup and get a little more background on the story here.

Fox Business News says you can save $1,200 each year by eliminating coffee from your budget. link

One county commissioner from Cleveland wants to do just that. link

Happy Friday!

The Blue Kangaroo

As my friend Norman Bodek likes to say, life has a funny way of giving you gifts. Sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised by small things that happen. Your day might be brightened by a kind stranger, for example, as was the case for me when I went to Blue Kangaroo Coffee Roasters, located in the deep Southeast PDX neighborhood of Sellwood.

The Blue Kangaroo

The Blue Kangaroo café is a friendly place. It is fairly open, with several comfortable chairs and an area for the kids by one of the front windows. It would be a good place to take kids, or even better, it would be a good place to go after you dropped your kids off somewhere, say, at preschool. As you can see from the picture below, the café has its own splash of PDX weird—a flying pink pig hanging from the ceiling.

I didn't see any flying kangaroos

Flo, the co-owner of the Blue Kangaroo, was working the bar the day I was in there, and she told me the story behind the Blue Kangaroo.

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First Links of 2011

Happy First Friday. Here are some links from this week:

Coffee hijacks plane! A plane had to make an emergency landing this week when the pilot spilled his coffee on his radio equipment, causing it to send out a hijack signal. Oops. link

Starbucks announced a logo change this week. They removed “Starbucks Coffee” from the logo. The move is supposed to help the company be recognized in non-English-speaking countries as well as expand into other products besides coffee. link

Apparently, at least one “marketing and branding expert” didn’t think it was such a good idea. I think he was just trying to drive traffic to his blog (success!) link

There’s a new app that helps you find the best coffee in San Francisco. If anyone is interested in developing one for Portland, let me know. I’d be interested in working on one with you. link

Snohomish County, Washington is pleased with the results of its new bikini barista regulations one year after it implemented them. link

Chile, on the other hand, has apparently not tried too hard to regulate them. link

A bit of planning advice for people considering opening a coffee shop. link

Starbucks and Kraft, still fighting. Couldn’t Howard Schultz and Irene Rosenfeld get together over a cup of coffee and figure things out?  link

Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson has a frank question about Parisian coffee in an article in the New York Times Magazine’s blog. I don’t think he’s too impressed. link

Unlike another person who tried to rob a Dutch Bros. coffee stand, Caitlin Marie Elsen got off easy, receiving six years in prison. link

With a wave of bad publicity in the last year, the Portland Police department might consider trying “coffee with the cops”. link

Heart Roasters

It is rough to live in a place where there is so much quality coffee available. After leaving the Spunky Monkey the other day, I walked around the corner to Heart, a two-minute walk over to Burnside and up a block. Heart opened in October 2009 and is owned by Wille Yli Luoma, a professional snowboarder from Finland who lives in Portland. The contrast between the two cafés was evident.

Heart

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My Very First Cuban

I stopped in at the Blue Kangaroo Café in Sellwood today and while I was there, Flo, the co-owner of the café, offered me my first cubano. No, the café is not trafficking in illegal cigars from the contentious island nation south of Florida. In the coffee world—for those who don’t know—a cubano is a sweet espresso drink that is prepared by adding sugar to the ground coffee in the portafilter before the barista pulls the shot. You occasionally see them on the menu at a café.  

At the Blue Kangaroo, they also add cinnamon to the coffee and then top the drink off with whipped cream. The cinnamon gives the very rich drink an interesting flavor. You might say that it tastes something like cinnamon toast or a Cinnabon cinnamon roll (a liquid breakfast, perhaps?). I don’t know if I could drink them every day (they’re pretty strong), but as a once-in-a-while treat, they’re worth a try.

I thought I had a picture of it to share with you, but apparently I got over-caffeinated and accidentally deleted the picture I took. Instead, I’ll leave you with a picture of the second double espresso of the day I drank just prior to the cubano (yes, it was quite the morning). My apologies. It’s not as pretty as the cubano, but at least the colors are nice. 

Another caffeinated memory