Portland Trip Recap

Courtesy of iammike.org
Courtesy of iammike.org

My whirlwind coffee trip to Portland, OR went pretty well, but I only made it to about 1/2 the places I thought I’d be able to. Work hours meant I had about 30 minutes in the morning on Saturday and Sunday, and then about 45-60 minutes on Saturday and Sunday night. Saturday night was a wash because my job is quite social and I opted to go out to dinner with colleagues rather than rushing out to chug epic amounts of coffee. The traffic was bad, anyway, so I probably would’ve only gotten to one or two places and it wouldn’t have been worth the lost networking opportunity, really.

My goal was to visit Red E Café, The Arbor Lodge, Extracto, Case Study Coffee Roasters, heart, Water Ave., Ristretto and Coava and then if I had a little extra time I’d jump to Stumptown, which I have been to before. Pretty ambitious, considering my time frame and that was staying/working out by the airport, no? LOL

Out of the list, I wasn’t able to get to Extracto, heart, Water Ave or Coava. I’m sure all four are great, but missing heart is the one that bummed me out the most. That being said, I should be back in PDX in April 2015, so I will make sure I plan better and get to some other places.

I’ll share my thoughts on the places I did make it to over the next week or two. I literally had a handful of minutes at each one, so it’s not like I could hang out and catch a vibe at each of them. I had mostly espressos for time’s sake and also because I love them and also because I didn’t want to be peeing all day long. I came home with a bag of cascara (coffee cherry tea) from Red E, and two bags of Yirgacheffe, one from Case Study and one from Tanager. Reviews galore once I’ve spent some time with them all!

I need to open a branch office of KCcoffeegeek in Portland and start getting there more regularly! Anyone want to start advertising on the site?! 🙂

More thoughts to come and a review on Huckleberry’s wonderful YirgZ to come!