Clover-brewing at River Maiden Coffee, Vantucky, Washington

My recent search for new and improved coffee experiences took me to River Maiden Coffee in Vancouver, Washington. River Maiden is a coffee shop that plays up Vancouver’s “second city” status with its “Vantucky Strikes Back” logo on cups and shirts. It also has “The Couve Abides” cups and shirts that fans of The Big Lebowski would appreciate.

River Maiden Coffee House

In addition to having an appreciation of pop culture, River Maiden is also one of very few independent (i.e., non-Starbucks) coffee shops in the world to have the Clover brewing machine.

The Clover is a machine that combines the brewing principles of a French press and a vacuum pot. It was designed by a couple of coffee-loving Stanford engineers, who proceeded to build a company around it. Starbucks executives were so impressed by the machine that they decided to buy the whole company. These days, if you want to try some Clover coffee, you either have to go to Starbucks or find one of the indies that had one before Starbucks bought them all. [An interesting side note: When the Clovers first came out, Stumptown had several, but then sold them all when managers heard Starbucks had bought Clover. The rumor was that Stumptown did not want to have any dealings with “corporate” Starbucks.]

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Caffeinated links for June 3, 2011

Here are the links for the week. They come with lots of sunshine and warm weather (hooray!), so enjoy:

From the legal department: a woman is suing Dunkin’ Donuts for putting sugar in her coffee. A legal liaison for DD was quoted as saying: "If you fail to request a sugar substitute, we can't read your mind. We sell doughnuts, not crystal balls." Ouch. link

Groupon, who filed paperwork this week for a $750 million IPO, had better look out. Google Offers debuted this week with a successful sale of over 1600 $10-vouchers (at a price of $3) for Portland’s own Floyd’s Coffee. Floyd’s is known for having outlets at all its tables, as well as serving Stumptown Coffee. link

Speaking of Stumptown—in case you missed it, here’s the NY Times article about the PDX-based coffee roaster’s expansion plans. link

On the same day that he published the rumor about Stumptown’s alleged sale to TSG, La Colombe’s Todd Carmichael was the subject of a feature in the Philadelphia Inquirer. La Colombe is investing in the revival of the Hatian coffee industry. link

In a contrarian move, Nectar of Life is lowering the prices for its Coffee of the Month club. link

McDonald’s, the coffee giant (what, you didn’t know?), is apologizing to Australians for the sorry state of the coffee the chain serves and is promising to do better. link

Another one from the legal department: Peet’s is being sued by Aegis, its development partner for the New York City market, who claims that Peet’s is trying to cut it out of the deals it had secured for the coffee company. link

Sumitomo Metal is going to buy used coffee grounds to fuel one of its power plants in Japan. The company isn’t going to use a lot, mixing 1% coffee with 99% coal, but it’s a start. link

Coffee juice, anyone? Coffee fruit flavor might be the next new fad in the cold beverage market. link

And finally:

Beginning August 1st, if you visit the Oregon Convention Center, you will be able to drink coffee at Portland Roasting Coffee’s first signature café. The venue dropped Starbucks and switched to the Portland company because of Portland Roasting’s commitment to sustainability. link

Coffee, Rumor and Innuendo

Last Friday, I posted a link to what I said was a sign of the impending rapture—that Stumptown Coffee was in negotiations to be bought out by Starbucks. There was absolutely no truth to the rumor whatsoever, so you can imagine the surprise I felt today when I went online to read the latest coffee news and one of the first things to come up was a story claiming that Stumptown had been sold (though not to Starbucks).

Todd Carmichael, the founder of LaCombe Torrefaction, an East Coast-based coffee company, wrote an article for Esquire that Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson had “sold his life’s work to the highest bidder.” Needless to say, this caused quite a stir in the coffee blogosphere and Twittersphere. Could it really be that Stumptown, Portland’s most famous coffee company who seemed to be everything but corporate, could be ‘selling out?’ What would that mean for Portlanders who cannot stand the idea of supporting a “corporate” coffee company? The idea seemed an anathema to many people.

There were several reasons to be skeptical about the article’s accuracy. Carmichael likes to make fun of the hipster coffee culture, as evidenced by this article, so it is not surprising that he took a shot at Stumptown. Also, the tone of the article and lack of evidence in it, lead one to believe that Carmichael, whose company is a direct competitor to Stumptown, does not like the fact that Stumptown is expanding on the East Coast and was looking for a way to give his rival some bad publicity among the anti-corporate crowd.

In response to the news, Willamette Weekly dug up a document showing that Stumptown Coffee Corporation, which is a separate entity from Stumptown Coffee Roasters, did apply for an  amendment to authority with the Oregon Secretary of State at the end of April. The new agent for the company is Alexander Panos, a managing director at TSG Consumer Partners, a private equity firm based in New York. In other words, there was a small bit of evidence behind the rumors.

However, the document does not address any questions about any relationship between Stumptown and TSG. It is impossible to tell from that document what Stumptown’s plans are, and Carmichael’s speculation is premature, unless he has other information. Esquire, if it wants to be taken seriously, needs to make sure there is more evidence before an article like this is published, especially when the author has a financial stake in a rival company.

Update: In the latest news this afternoon, also from the Willamette Weekly, Stumptown responded to the article, saying that it did open itself up to some outside investment to help fund its expansion, but that Duane Sorenson, Stumptown’s founder, is still in charge. Therefore, Portlanders can relax—Stumptown has not sold out. You do not have to worry about losing another local chain to corporate America.

Update 2 (June 2): Stumptown did allow for some investment by Panos (Sorenson still controls the company) and the plan is to expand into Chicago and San Francisco. The NY Times has the story here.

Update 3 (June 6): Willamette Weekly is today reporting that Stumptown sold 90% of the company to TSG, though it seems like the source is Carmichael. It's hard to know what to believe. . . You can read the story here.

My question is, if Stumptown had sold out, so what? It is Sorenson’s company, after all, and the last time I checked, we still live in the USA, where capitalism is the economic system. If someone wants to build a company and sell it so that he or she can fulfill other dreams, that should be his or her right. There is nothing especially noble about starting a company and staying with it until you die. Times and people change—we have to accept it. Unless, of course, the news is just a rumor or a blogger’s attempt to be funny.

Coffee highlights of the week plus links

[Note: I just made two corrections to this article. The first was the spelling of the name of the espresso at Oblique. I changed Derailer to the proper Dérailleur. I also had written that Oblique's owner was Jim Chandler. It is not. His name is John. Sorry for the mistakes!]

I tried two different coffees this week that were worth mentioning. The first was an espresso of the Dérailleur Blend at Oblique Coffee. The shot was balanced, chocolaty and super smooth—almost silky. It went down very easy, without any sugar. John Chandler, Oblique’s owner, said that since the weather had become warmer, his espresso machine seemed to really be “dialed in” and was pulling great shots. I’m not sure why that is true, but I would have to agree with him.

The second noteworthy coffee was a cup of Stumptown’s Kenya Gatomboya, brewed on a Clover (normally, you only find Clovers at Starbucks, but Vancouver’s River Maiden Coffee still has one from the early days). Stumptown just released the Gatomboya this week, and the early reviews have been good. The flavors that came through were cherry and butterscotch. Tasty!

Here’s some links to get you through the weekend:

You can no longer get cannabis in the coffee shops of Amsterdam (link), but you can still get coffee in the cannabis shops of Portland. link

Portland Roasting Coffee made it into an article in Sustainable Business Oregon. link

Instead of me discussing rising coffee prices, I’ll let an article at Salon.com do it. link

CNN Money has another analysis of prices that says pretty much the same thing: in the near future they’re only going UP. link

In the other Portland (PWM) this week, Dunkin’ Donuts was selling iced coffee to help support cancer research. link

Time magazine asks if you would hang out in a Subway café. My response? An emphatic no. link

Howard Schultz was in Vancouver, B.C., this week, talking about his company, coffee prices and a multitude of other things. link

You might have heard of a CSA for vegetables, but have you ever heard of one for coffee? link

There’s a movement underway to rid Seattle of disposable coffee cups (yeah, right). link

Enjoy Memorial Day Weekend. Summer is (reportedly) here! #whenits55andrainingthatsnotreallysummer

Kobos Coffee (Part 2) - How Kobos came to PDX

 

[Part 1 of this history can be found here]

Originally from Massachusetts, David Kobos spent many of his years growing up in New York. The pursuit of higher education eventually led him out West, and he spent four years getting a master’s degree from Reed College. After graduating, he taught in Milwaukie for a couple years. During this time, Kobos used to stop in and get coffee from Boyd’s Little Red Wagon.

“That's how I got started drinking real coffee," he said.

After his time in Milwaukie, Kobos moved back to New York, where he got a job as a teacher at a school in the Lower East Side (of Manhattan). In his free time, he began exploring restaurants in Chinatown and Little Italy, which were both nearby the school. He became fascinated with the city’s food and coffee culture and began visiting the shops of the Lower West Side too, where the Shapiro Brothers and the McNulty family were famous for roasting coffee.

At some point during his culinary explorations, Kobos met his future wife and got married. The couple went on a honeymoon to the Pacific Northwest and then returned to the Big Apple. Together, they really got into exploring restaurants. His wife was a good cook, he said, so they began to shop at higher-quality markets, trying to duplicate at home what they had been tasting in restaurants. The couple also drank plenty of coffee and visited all of New York’s famous cafés.

Kobos recalled some of the smells in the neighborhoods where the stores roasted their own coffee:

"There was this one little Italian roaster, down in Little Italy, who used to take one kind of coffee and just burn the hell out of it. You could smell it if you went anywhere near that place,” he said, laughing.

Eventually, the Kobos and his wife decided they needed a change of scenery. Remembering the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, they decided to move across the country to Portland, where they would indulge their love of food and coffee by starting a cookware and coffee retail store (and a family). It was a lot of change in a short amount of time, and their friends were skeptical.

“’You’re doing what?’—that’s what they asked us. They thought we were crazy,” Kobos said, recalling the reactions of his friends and family. “You’ve got a job already. Why would you want to do that?”

Undeterred, the couple moved forward with their plans. However, plans soon changed. The original plan was to ask Boyd’s Coffee to roast coffee beans for Kobos to sell in the store, but when David asked them, they turned him down. It was a pivotal moment for the Kobos story.

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