Why does seattle have so much coffee

I ordered something embarrassing: tall, caramel, nonfat—but through the froufrou, I could taste the difference in the espresso shots. I soon stripped my order down to double short lattes. Starbucks was in its ascendancy, expanding across the country as fast as a flash flood in a box canyon. Howard Schultz, who joined Starbucks in , had become smitten with the coffee drinks he had tasted in Italy, including a longer cappuccino called a latte, and he urged his colleagues at Starbucks to start serving espresso drinks at their growing chain of bean shops.

And, indeed, in those years I never felt more comfortable than when I was in a coffee shop. I felt a kinship with my fellow latte sippers: the lean tomboys, the ratty-haired band dudes, the rumpled students with their Italian dictionaries. I liked the streetside bustle of Monorail espresso. But David Schomer and his crew at Espresso Vivace had won my heart and my patience good espresso takes time with their bittersweet, full-bodied, aromatic espresso shots. Things got tawdry: I moved to Los Angeles for a few years in , cooking in L.

I had a brief, salacious affair with a milky frozen coffee concoction called the Ice Blended. I was not the only person to fall for the idea of a frozen drink—Starbucks purchased the Coffee Connection in , and with it the right to sell its frozen coffee drink, the Frappuccino. During my absence, coffeehouses had spread.

Each neighborhood, from Ballard to Georgetown, coalesced around its own coffeehouse. With my first laptop in tow, I headed to coffee shops around town to drink coffee and write. Since its introduction to Europe in the years of the Enlightenment, coffee has always been a business drink, keeping the mind clear and the words flowing.

Give us feedback. Read Next View. Courtyard by Marriott Seattle Northgate. Staypineapple, Watertown, University District Seattle. Four Seasons Hotel Seattle. Show More. Cookies Policy We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements. It also led to a major early partnership with Starbucks, to whom La Marzocco supplied machines until the early s, when cost-cutting and scaling measures led Starbucks to develop its own line of push-button automatic machines.

Many influential specialty coffee professionals got their start at Starbucks and were trained on La Marzocco equipment. Machines originally sold to Starbucks soon proliferated on the resale market, making La Marzocco a recognized leader on independent cafe counters around the region and later the world. Every movement needs a true believer, and for the Seattle espresso culture, it was David Schomer.

Perhaps the greatest influence of David Schomer is his work as an author. Now in its third edition, the book is widely recognized as an industry bible for espresso technique. It took fictional cafes to capture the imagination of the wider American public, inextricably connecting coffee culture with the Pacific Northwest.

And although they hang out at coffee shops in Singles and drink a ton of diner coffee on Twin Peaks , no fictional depiction better epitomizes the fusion of region and beverage than Frasier , which began airing on NBC in The show, scripted and filmed in Los Angeles, gets a lot wrong about Seattle life; for starters, almost nobody dresses like that here.

Coffee as an industry has drawn more than its fair share of rogues, quirks, and kooks. Along the way, Babcock helped recast the coffee farmer as an artisan, on par with the great vignerons of Europe, and Zoka became an influential company for the coffee industry, training an impressive roster of coffee professionals with an influence and impact that continues to this day, from Seattle to San Francisco to Nairobi.

At the turn of the 21st century, specialty coffee felt like it was on the cusp of a zeitgeist, in which specialty coffee would become part of the fabric of a certain kind of urban life across the country. Along the way it amassed a formidable armada of wholesale accounts — independent cafes that were signed up to serve Stumptown, thereby taking part in the cool, almost like an indie record label.

Sorenson sold the brand in the s twice , actually and went on to open and close a string of restaurants, markets, and juice bars. But for all that, perhaps the most enduring legacy of Stumptown emerged in , when Sorenson and his team launched a then-unheard-of product category into the coffee consumption sphere: ready-to-drink cold brew. In little brown bottles modeled off of retro Olympia Beer stubbies, Stumptown managed to harness the quality and cool of specialty coffee with a scalable and shelf-stable product approach.

So goes the cycle of entrepreneurism, success, and scale; Stumptown went from your favorite indie band to the sort of thing they play at baseball stadiums, and its products are now sold in grocery stores and markets across the country. Not long afterward, the brand sold for tens of millions, and cold brew? Gen X did more than sass its elders and inherit the last gasp of the baby boomer endless prosperity cycle.

At the time, large companies like Folgers, Maxwell House, and Hill Brothers dominated the coffee industry. This was accomplished by substituting expensive and flavorful Arabica beans for cheaper and less flavorful beans. But this is where the PNW steps in. At a time when the coffee scene was becoming dull and mundane, coffee establishments in the PNW started to do things differently.

New coffee roasters in the area dedicated themselves to quality and flavor. Starbucks started selling high-quality beans before it eventually turned to selling cups of coffee, too, and moved into its well-known original location in Pike Place in But the flavor alone was not what set these companies apart from the standardized coffees of the likes of Folgers and Maxwell House.

Independent coffee roasters used innovation to their advantage, too. The first drive-thru coffee shop, Motor Moka, was founded in Portland, Oregon in All of these creative, flavorful, and high-quality coffee shops have helped set a new standard for coffee.

This is one of the reasons coffeehouses are so popular in the culture of the PNW and elsewhere. These qualities, very much exemplified in the coffeehouses of the PNW, have kept the coffeehouse a significant part of culture around the world.

Coffeehouses have long been seen as places for free expression, whether that be intellectual or creative expression. Its ties with intellectual expression are evident in the close connection between coffeehouses and universities. Coffeehouses and universities share a common interest, in that they both provide a space for sharing ideas.