Portland Micro Roasters Fueling the Local Economy (Part 2)

Proudly spotlighting Portland's coffee culture, we published a roundup of local micro roasters last month.

Hopefully a full month has given you time to visit each Courier, Ristretto and Stumptown location, but now it's time for the second installment in our micro roaster series.

Why frequent corporate coffee chains when every quadrant of this city features not only an abundance of local coffee shops but also locales where you can see your beans roasted before they become your brew?

With some 30 local micro roasters in Portland, here are a few more local alternatives to Starbucks.

Heart Coffee Roasters

Heart Coffee Roasters is located in the Kerns neighborhood, in the Burnside East business district.

Leave it to a Finnish pro snowboarder to stop seeking adventure on the slopes and start one of SE Portland's most beloved coffee shops and roasteries. In 2009, an inexplicable love for coffee fueled Wille Yli-Luoma with more thrill than riding big mountains, and he put his energies into opening Heart. Alongside wife Rebekah, the need to take risks and face the unknown manifested itself in the business of coffee roasting, and the Yli-Luoma's have succeeded as an integral part of Portland's collaborative coffee culture.

"Collaborating with other local businesses is a great way to develop a stronger sense of community and economy," Rebekah Yli-Luoma says. "On one level of collaborating, we serve baked goods and sandwiches that come from local businesses across the city: Bakeshop, Florio, Fressen, Lauretta Jean's (kiosk), and Meat Cheese Bread. Each of these businesses compliment Heart coffee and we stand behind each of them. We also use Sunshine local dairy.

"On another level, Heart has recently worked with Holden. We are both locally owned and operated companies that aim to bring the best product to our consumers that we can." The superior snowboarding outerwear designers recently teamed up with the micro roasters to create an environmentally conscious coffee from sustainable Brazilian farms packaged in "the first biodegradable, one-way valve coffee bags available in the Pacific Northwest," according to Transworld Snowboarding.

Heart also collaborates with other local business on so many more levels, from sharing retail space to donating coffee to nonprofits to serving coffee at events that support Portland-based businesses. And all this growth and collaboration enables Heart to employ 13 workers, offering medical benefits as well as creating specialty positions for select staff members as the micro roaster continues to become stronger.

Heart Coffee Roasters, 2211 E Burnside, 503.206.6602

Extracto Coffeehouse & Roastery

Extracto Coffee Roasters is located in the Concordia neighborhood, in the Fox Chase business district.

Supporting the local economy is a guiding philosophy for Extracto Coffee Roasters' Celeste and Chris Brady. The Juneau, Alaska, natives come from a city of small, locally owned businesses where "knowing your neighbors and their families made shopping local a neighborly thing to do," Celeste Brady says. "My parents owned a local business and I grew up being aware of many people and faces who owned businesses," which have since struggled due to the ebb and flow of a summer tourist industry and competition from big box stores.

"Chris and I follow an overall guiding principle of trying to buy as much as we can locally," Celeste Brady says. "Buying from a locally owned business is a first priority, shopping locally follows. We make an effort to work with other vendors who follow a practice of using natural, seasonal and regional ingredients."

This includes sourcing from "a number of local bakeries who supply us with amazing, seasonal delights daily," Celeste Brady says. "The dairy we use comes from regional farms. We buy our paper products from a locally owned company. The bulk of our green coffee is delivered by a locally owned shipping company." Plus, as Courier's Joel Domreis mentioned, Extracto and Courier often share a semi-truck for local shipping, saving on freight charges.

"Urban Gleaners picks up our leftover pastries to feed hungry folks in the community and we donate coffee to the Food Bank," Celeste Brady adds. Extracto extends its involvement at community events by providing coffee for school fundraisers and auctions as well as supplying Friends of Trees with coffee during annual planting events in the neighborhood. And, Celeste Brady says, "We encourage local gardeners to make use of our spent coffee grounds and chaff for their gardens."

With two northeast locations, Extracto utilized local craftspeople in the construction each shop. "The fixtures and furniture were acquired locally almost exclusively," Celeste Brady says. "We have local artists featured monthly at the Killingsworth shop. Steve Matthews, who lives in our neighborhood, painted the awesome mural at the Prescott shop." And, "like most coffee shops, we reserve space for folks to leave business cards and flyers." 

Extracto beans are available for purchase at the locally owned Pastaworks, among other places, or in chocolate bar form. The latest collaboration involves Elizabeth Montes' Sahagún Handmade Chocolates. The KA-POW! Coffee Bars are the "world's first single-origin coffee bar," according to Sahagún's website, blending Extracto's Ethiopia Sidamo Adem Chilco with chocolate. (Past and present flavor collaborations have also featured beans from Ristretto, Stumptown, Water Avenue Coffee, and Heart.)

Roasting two days a week at the Killingsworth location and delivering wholesale coffee twice a week to "three coffeehouses, seven restaurants, one winery, and a number of offices," Celeste Brady says, Extracto employs "13 full-time, awesome people in addition to Chris and myself."

Not to mention, "We also work with local repair people. We prefer to hire independent folks when we can." And, Celeste Brady adds, "Our fridge guy is a superhero."

Extracto Coffeehouse & Roastery, 2921 NE Killingsworth St., 503.281.1764

Cellar Door Coffee Roasters

Cellar Door Coffee Roasters is located in the Hosford-Abernethy neighborhood, in the Central Eastside Industrial District.

Partners Jeremy Adams and Andrea Pastor literally brewed up Cellar Door Coffee Roasters in their cellar in May 2007.

"We started in our home basement where we built out a commercial facility with a three-kilo roaster," Pastor explains. "We outgrew that after a couple years and bought our current 12-kilo roaster and installed it in the basement of the coffee shop. The rest is history."

Cellar Door has been not only a local collaborator, whether that's participating in Supportland or creating relationships with local farmers to buy fruits and greens, but also a small business incubator.

"Several different projects have come through and used our kitchen as a commissary," Pastor says. "Portobello, the awesome vegan restaurant, was started here in the coffee shop several years ago. Charlie from Trailhead Roasters helped build the roastery and then launched his company out of this space. We have a rotating display of local art; we sell T-shirts, comic books and zines made by local artists."

As for the edible fare, Cellar Door currently makes all of its own food and baked goods in-house, but "over the years we've always bought as many locally made products as possible," Pastor says, including sourcing from Portland establishments like Nuvrei, Dovetail, Voodoo Doughnut, and Cherry Bomb Bakery. Other individual ingredients come from Holy Kakow! (vanilla and chocolate for drinks), Chain Bridge Bakery (bagels) and more. 

As of August, the latest addition to Cellar Door's offerings is the restaurant and cocktail bar aptly named 2nd Story, where "we're even more fastidious about sourcing as much as we can from nearby," Pastor says. "We buy bread from Little T and have a full complement of locally distilled liquor. We always have local beer on tap. Willamette Valley wines are featured on our menu. This is a huge deal for us."

Supporting the community also involves donating coffee to day shelters, schools, fundraisers, and even Occupy Portland, and Cellar Door's physical locale is also available for use. "We've had at least three or four independent movies use the coffee shop as a shooting location," Pastor adds. "People hold workshops, book groups, and we've even had a couple of weddings in our space."

Cellar Door operates in an almost exclusively local sphere with coffee served in area restaurants, coffee shops, carts, and grocery stores.

"We want to be able to work closely with the people who sell our coffee to the public, so we've turned down accounts where we would have blindly shipped the coffee without knowing how it was being served," Pastor explains.

And all this adds up to "about 10 people working here, between the coffee shop, the roastery and the 2nd Story restaurant," Pastor says. "We wear a lot of the hats ourselves, but one of our main goals when we started was to offer our employees a way to earn a decent wage, get affordable health care coverage, and enjoy coming to work a majority of the time. That's probably the accomplishment we're proud of the most." 

Cellar Door Coffee Roasters, 2001 SE 11th Ave., 503.234.7155

We'll continue this list in the coming weeks, but you likely have your own favorite micro roaster. If you missed part one, we might have mentioned them there. If not, who's your fave local alternative to Starbucks?