Turkish coffee at Marino Adriatic Café

If you are hanging out in Portland and you get tired of drinking great espresso and brewed coffee, you have some other options available too. I was wandering up Southeast Division the other day when I came across Marino Adriatic Café, a quirky spot just a couple blocks down the street from the original Stumptown. The café is definitely an original, and it might be the only café in the city where you can get Vispak, a coffee roasted in Bosnia. When I went, I was looking for something different, so I ordered a Turkish coffee.

Kristi, the barista, showed me how they make Turkish coffee at Caffè Marino. She started with super-finely ground coffee, and put one or two tablespoons in the bottom of a cezve (also known as an ibrik), a small copper pot that is the traditional vessel for making Turkish coffee. She set the cezve on the counter while she heated some water in a kettle.

When the water began to boil, Kristi took it off the burner and placed the cezve containing the dry grounds directly on the burner for 5-10 seconds, toasting them a little bit.

At this point, she added the water to the cezve and put it back on the burner. In less than a minute, the mixture began to boil, creating a frothy brown layer that threatened to spill over the sides of the cezve. Each time it was about to spill, Kristi pulled the pot off the heat and gently tapped it on the counter. She repeated this process three times.

Having prepared the coffee, she served it on a small round copper tray, along with a delicate ceramic cup about the size of a demitasse. Kristi suggested I wait a couple minutes before pouring my coffee so that the grounds could brew a little longer and so they could settle to the bottom of the cezve. There is no filter involved with Turkish coffee, so you have to be careful when you pour it, or you will get a cup full of grit.

My Turkish coffee, served in the cezve

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Barista Profile – Thomas Suprenant

[Over the last several months, I have spent quite a few hours in cafés, learning about coffee and giving my impressions of the cafés. It has been fun. There are so many good cafés and I have been spoiled to be able try so many different (and high-quality) coffees. While I love the adventure, one of the downsides of doing this is that I feel an obligation to keep looking for new cafés all the time, and I never really become a regular at any of them.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to focus more on the people and the stories behind the coffee shops in this city as opposed to the cafés themselves. I am still going to write the occasional café review (there are more cafés that I want to visit), but that will be less of a focus. Instead, I will be working to meet people and talk about a variety of coffee-related things. If you are someone who has a café, is a barista, roasts coffee or just loves coffee and has a unique story to tell, let me know what you are up to and I will share your story here. I would like to interview you and learn more about the great things you are doing (if you are doing something great that is not related to coffee, we can figure out some tie-in, even if we just sit down over a cup of good coffee). The following is the first post in that direction.]

Thomas Suprenant is one of the skilled baristas at Cellar Door Coffee Roasters. In the picture above, he is competing at his first Northwest Regional Barista Championship in January. On my recent stop at the café, Thomas gave me a tour and sat down to tell me a little bit of his own story. Many thanks to Cassie, the other barista on duty, for taking care of the café while we were talking.

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Cellar Door Coffee Roasters

Cellar Door Coffee Roasters is one of those places that has been on my radar for quite some time, ever since I wandered by on a sunny autumn day (yes, we do have sun in Portland once in a while). After watching the first day of the Northwest Regional Barista Championships in Tacoma, I decided to make visiting the café a higher priority. Cellar Door had two baristas competing at the contest, a sure sign that the café’s baristas care about their craft.

Cellar Door Coffee, located on the busy SE 11th Avenue between Hawthorne and Division, has been in its current location for about three years. Jeremy Adams and Andrea Pastor, the owners, founded the company in 2007, roasting small batches of coffee in their garage and selling it at farmers markets. As their direct-to-customer business increased, the operation outgrew its original location.

Today the café takes up the lower floor of an old (Victorian?) house that has been remodeled. It is not large, but the space is comfortable. There are a handful of tables in front of the bar, a few seats along the front window and a back area that has some soft chairs and a few toys for kids. A small roaster sits by the front door that Adams uses to roast coffee samples for cupping. Large trucks occasionally roll by and give the café a gentle shake.

Cellar Door

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Courier Coffee Roasters

It is always a challenge for coffee companies to carve out their place in the market, and even more so in a town that has as many cafés and roasters as Portland has. Some companies distinguish themselves by offering a great café experience, some by freshly roasting coffee in their cafés and others stand out simply by being weird. Courier Coffee Roasters distinguishes itself in two ways: 1) it always has ultra-fresh coffee; and 2) it uses bicycles to deliver its coffee around the city.

Courier prides itself on providing freshly roasted coffee, freshly ground coffee and freshly brewed coffee every day. If you haven’t gotten the message yet (and we preach it a lot around here), freshness matters. Each day, Joel and Alex, Courier’s owners, roast the quantity of beans they think they will use that day (or perhaps in the next two days). It can be a grind (pun intended) to roast every day in small quantities, but if that is what it takes to provide people with the freshest coffee, they are willing to do it.


Courier Coffee, with bike out front

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Lava Java (Ridgefield, WA)

On the way up to the Northwest Barista Championships in Tacoma, Brandon Arends and I left Portland about 7am, giving us time to stop for coffee somewhere. Brandon said he knew of a good place along the way, so we didn’t stop at one of the cafés in Portland before leaving town. About a half hour after leaving SE Portland, we pulled off of I-5 at exit 14 near Ridgefield, Washington in search of a morning wake-up.

Despite knowing that Brandon had high standards, I was still a little skeptical when he pulled into the parking lot of a small strip mall out in the middle of nowhere (check this map to see what I mean). There didn’t seem to be much of anything nearby—no houses (unless you count the RV park that you could see in the distance), a few stores and zero foot traffic. The lack of people made me wonder how a cafe so far away from anything could stay in business. My previous experiences with similar out-of-the-way shops have rarely been great, and have sometimes been disastrous, so I was less than enthusiastic.

A plain exterior, but. . .

As we parked in front of the Lava Java sign, Brandon told me that he knew the owner of the café, Phuong Tran. He also said that she won the 2005 US Barista Championships. Oh. That changed my perception of the café rather quickly.

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