Thanks to its soggy climate, its people’s proclivity for hanging out in cafes, and the local love for mood-modifying substances, the Pacific Northwest has shaped and influenced global coffee culture for more than 50 years. It’s the birthplace of America’s obsession with the espresso shot, its ongoing love affair with cold brew, and its underlying ethos of cafe cool. You can taste it in the streets, rising like so much cappuccino foam. Across state lines and generations, visionary entrepreneurs and artisans have built the Pacific Northwest into a globally recognized hub for coffee quality, technological innovation, and espresso bar culture.
As a lifelong pan-Northwesterner and inveterate cafe dweller, I’ve had a front-row seat to the movement across the decades of specialty coffee — a term first coined to denote coffees that score highly in qualitative buying circles but is now an expansive cultural signifier. In 2009 I co-founded the website Sprudge, the world’s most popular coffee publication, in — where else? — a coffee bar on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Today Sprudge is published out of — no surprise — Portland.
No timeline can ever be definitive, but I’ve tried to distill the essence of the story of specialty coffee in the Pacific Northwest: It begins with striving, baby boomer empire building in Seattle; travels down I-5 with Gen X ennui; and ends, for now, with millennial and Gen Z disruption in Portland. It is a story that is achingly,…
