When people think of the Pacific Northwest, along with gray skies and evergreen trees, coffee often comes to mind. That’s because some of the most iconic modern coffee brands — Starbucks, Stumptown, Dutch Bros — all call our region home. For a place that doesn’t even grow coffee, we’ve had an outsized influence on the global coffee culture and are continuing to shape its future.
History of coffee
Americans drink more than 500 million cups of coffee each day, but many of us don’t know much about the beans that we brew. For starters, coffee is not a bean at all, but instead is the seed of a coffee cherry.
Ethiopia has long been considered the birthplace of coffee with its discovery credited to a ninth century goat herder who legend says noticed his goats were “dancing in the moonlight” after eating the red fruit of the coffee tree. The first tangible evidence of coffee drinking dates back to the 15th century in the Sufi monasteries in Yemen. From there, coffee spread to Egypt, Syria and Turkey, then across Europe and into the Americas by the 18th century.
A turning point for the brew in what we now call the United States is said to have come after the Boston Tea Party, when a revolt against the heavy tax on tea gave way to coffee’s rise in popularity. By the 1900s, coffee was everywhere, including the Pacific Northwest.
Since the early 1900s, the Pacific Northwest has been on the forefront of global coffee culture.
Stephani Gordon / OPB
Coffee’s three waves
The modern rise in coffee’s popularity is often classified into three waves, as first suggested in 2003 by coffee professional Trish Rothgeb (née Skeie). The first wave encompasses nearly everything up to when coffee became accessible and affordable to the wider population with companies like Folgers and Maxwell House making what was once a luxury item, a grocery store staple by the 1950s.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, the roast of the coffee started to become the focus, marking the beginning of coffee’s second wave. “[It was] the pioneering efforts of Peet’s and Starbucks to bring a really dark roast coffee — something more distinct — to the American palette that completely transformed coffee in the United States,” said Shauna Alexander, vice president, coffee and sustainability at Stumptown Coffee Roasters.
It was 1966 when Peet’s Coffee opened its doors in Berkeley, California, while Starbucks Coffee came a few years later in 1971 to Seattle’s Pike Place Market. In addition to the darker roasts, this was also the advent of specialty coffee. Coined in the mid-’70s, the term “specialty coffee” emphasized the idea that, like wine, different terroir and varietals will produce unique flavor profiles in the finished, brewed product. The second wave was when lattes and other espresso-based drinks became popularized.
By the ‘80s and ‘90s, palates were shifting again, with roasters and drinkers focusing on the quality of the coffee bean itself and ushering in coffee’s third wave. Three prominent coffee roasters came to be associated with this wave: Chicago’s Intelligentsia, Counter Culture from North Carolina and Portland’s own Stumptown Coffee Roasters.
Alexander explained that during this time, the approach to roasting shifted away from the dark roasts of the second wave and towards a lighter roast to highlight the flavors inherent to each coffee variety. There was also a push for more transparency around how the coffee was sourced, with Stumptown becoming a pioneer in the direct trade sourcing model.
“Direct trade was about circumventing a system that wasn’t working [and] going directly to the farms,” she said. “Knowing the farmers, negotiating directly with them, and offering coffees to customers with a level of transparency, with a level of visibility to the farm, that was pretty uncommon.”
The modern rise in popularity of coffee is often classified into three waves, with notable Pacific Northwest coffee companies Starbucks and Stumptown Coffee Roasters at the forefront of the second and third waves, respectively.
Emily Hamilton / OPB
The future of Pacific Northwest coffee
More than a century after Fred G. Meyer was selling coffee from a horse-drawn cart, Portland is still a hub of coffee culture. And the future of coffee in the Pacific Northwest is still being charted. While there has not been a push to define a fourth wave of coffee, so-called microroasters are sure to be at the forefront of tomorrow’s coffee culture.
In Portland alone, nearly 100 microroasters are working on a considerably smaller scale to bring small batches of coffee to the community. Oftentimes, these beans are roasted in quantities as small as 5 or 10 pounds at a time, with many of these microroasters using a co-roasting facility.
“Roasting good coffee is really expensive,” said Joey Gleason, the co-owner of Buckman Coffee Factory. “As a small roaster, I kept having to really stretch to purchase equipment and instead of being able to focus on my craft or finding fun coffees, it was always about the equipment.”
Which is why she, along with her sister Cassy Gleason, opened the co-roasting facility in 2015. The space allows for a shared cost of equipment and business overhead, and opens the door to some roasters who would have otherwise been priced out of roasting their own.
“There can be a little bit of a hurdle just getting into any new industry or being a small business owner,” said Cassy Gleason. “We have a lot of women who are roasting in this space, people of color who are roasting in this space, and we want to create a really welcoming and easy environment to enter.”
Roaster Keia Booker smelling coffee beans while roasting at Buckman Coffee Factory in Portland, Ore., on Dec. 8, 2023. She uses the changing aroma and bean color to help guide the roasting process.
Stephani Gordon / OPB
Meet the microroaster
One of the roasters utilizing the Buckman space is Keia Booker, who along with her husband, Martyn Leaper, own Keia & Martyn’s Coffee.
Between Booker’s experience as a barista and Leaper’s as a roaster, the pair collectively have spent decades in coffee, but Booker’s time in the industry was not always a welcoming one.
“I’ve had some not-so-great experiences oftentimes being the only Black person working at most of the shops that I worked at,” she said.
Originally, Leaper was running a small, subscription-based coffee service called Top Cup but was eager to have Booker more involved. She agreed, on one condition:
“I said to him, ‘I will do it, if you teach me how to roast.’ I really wanted to create a different narrative of what it could look like to be a roaster,” said Booker.
During her time away from coffee, Booker had been working with organizations that prioritized justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, and she saw firsthand how that could shape the way staff was supported. So when she came on as the roaster, Booker wanted to integrate her own social and environmental justice work into the coffee company.
“I came up with this equity pricing model where we give people three different options of what they can pay,” she said. “To be honest, I was thinking about reparations. I was thinking ‘How do people acknowledge the disparities and access to opportunities that people have had?’”
The tiered pricing is optional, but Booker says it makes customers think a little more intentionally about how they spend their money. It also helps keep coffee more affordable overall, “I think that everybody deserves some good quality stuff and I don’t wanna outprice our customers.”
In the summer of 2023, Keia & Martyn’s Coffee expanded from a subscription-only model to adding a pop-up cafe location at the Lloyd Center Mall — something Booker says completely changed the demographic of their customers.
“A majority of our customers are white people in our subscriptions, but a majority of our customers here at the mall are people of color,” she said. “I think the cherry on top of moving into the mall has been the ability to see people that look like me as our customers.”
