Alternative Weekly Tackles the State of Coffee in Portland

Photo of Ristretto Roasters Nicolai

Portland’s alternative weekly, the Willamette Week, has published an awesome series of feature stories dedicated to one of the city’s greatest modern achievements — coffee.

For Portlanders, the Week‘s coffee issue should serve to turn them on to some of the newer coffee spots around the city. For visitors, the feature stories help shine a light on what might be considered the state of the art in specialty coffee retail production in the United States. For coffee professionals, the Week explores how some Portland roasters are working to make the city streets smell like “burnt toast,” or how others are collaborating for group purchases to achieve the best value for high-end beans.

Plus, there are coffee and doughnut pairings!

In the intro, Ruth Brown writes:

We’re living in the best coffee city in the country. It’s easy to become complacent about that, when swinging by the cafe down the street for a single-origin cold-brew sweetened with agave nectar and served in a biodegradable cup alongside a laundry list of tasting notes is everyday. But if any one of the 11 new cafes we’ve reviewed in this year’s coffee issue opened in just about any other city in the country, it would instantly be the best coffee shop in town. In Portland, we barely raise an eyebrow: “Oh, another small-batch third-wave roaster in a bike shop/refurbished warehouse/NRHP-listed storefront? Whatevs.”

Read the full series here.