Defending the Cup

In Portland, it's easy to take good coffee for granted. We've got more indie coffee shops per capita than anywhere but Seattle. But unlike Seattle, our micro-roasters are so sought after that Tokyo shops now sell Heart, Stumptown and Coava beans.

But lately there's fear that the third-wave coffee revolution is under attack, from without and within.

Last month, Peet's Coffee & Tea bought both Stumptown and Chicago's Intelligentsia, bringing them under the control of an international conglomerate. Home coffee machines keep getting better and better—in our own offices, local roaster Nossa Familia installed a fancy Ratio robo-barista that replicates a pourover by carefully dribbling "bloomed" hot water over a cone. K-Cups continue to proliferate among earth-haters—in addition to every imaginable flavor of sugared coffee substance, they now come in Campbell's soup versions.

But as we've discovered while putting together this coffee issue, Portland cafes are fighting back, crafting coffee in ways you won't ever get at home.

Sellwood's Either/Or makes elaborate coffee mocktails like a cold-brew Negroni spiced with pine and juniper, while cafes across the city have discovered the refreshing miracle of carbonated caffeine. They'll lure you in with artisanal toast and pan-African pop-ups.

Among our 10 favorite cafes that opened in the past year, you can drink the city's finest Turkish coffee from the top of a double-decker bus, sip Indonesian-style ginger brew while waiting for fried chicken at Screen Door, or even partake in mulberry and aged-oolong teas made by a new generation of rare-tea shops springing up all over town.

In Portland right now, you can get traditional Vietnamese iced coffee at a Powell Boulevard drive-thru, house-roasted coffee at 3:30 am in East Portland and rich cortado from fifth-generation Nicaraguan coffee farmers at a food-cart pod.

Every day before most of you wake up, Portland baristas are defending your right to a good cup of coffee.