t o n x . o r g

My cohort Kyle and I paid a visit earlier this week to the folks at Portland’s incomparable Stumptown Coffee.

Cuppers line up at Stumptown’s Annex. Trainer Stephen Vick keeps his cupping spoon close at hand.

Hanging out with the Stumptown crew is always a learning experience. Good coffee, good beer, and good conversation are to be had in abundance. We had the privilege of attending a couple of cuppings at Stumptown’s Annex - the open-to-the-public bean tasting space 2 doors down from their Belmont location. We tasted a number of top Kenya auction lots and some pre-ship samples from Finca El Injerto in Guatemala while Stumptown founder Duane Sorenson dropped science on the varietals, farms, and nuances of processing.

Head roaster Joel focuses on a batch of the awesome Kenya AA Nyeri. We encounter Portland coffee rabble rouser Chris Tacy at the downtown cafe and discuss the finer points of pressure profiling, automotive hot-rodding and Belgian ales.

There is a lot of knowledge at the Stumptown and they are doing a great job at sharing it with their customers. One small but noteworthy new item in their arsenal is a beautiful letterpressed brewing guide. As a roaster it is frustrating that you can give someone the best coffee in the world, but there are a hundred ways they can fuck it up once they get it home. Explaining the subtleties of proper brewing to the uninitiated often can come across as absurd or overwrought and most people tune out having enough experience making coffee the same old (flawed) way for years. This brilliant little guide however, manages to convey the anal retentive details of right brewing in a concise, fun package.

The guide takes you through five recommended brew methods - press pot, cafe solo, moka pot, vacuum pot, and lever espresso. The illustrations are useful and fun and the guide repeatedly touches on important issues like grind quality and cleaning your gear. When I first saw a copy of it a few weeks ago I quite honestly almost wept out of a combination of awe and envy. Simple yet so well executed, the publication of this little guide ranks just below the launch of the Clover in my odd pantheon of great coffee moments of the last year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Coffee, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.