Posts Tagged ‘Stumptown’
June 5, 2010
It was painful to pass so close to Stumptown at the Ace Hotel without stopping, but I was glad I did, finding myself off the lobby of another boutique hotel, the Gershwin, in a different temple to caffeine — Birch Coffee. I had been wanting to visit after noticing it on The Times’s list of the best of the new coffee cafes. It was love at first visit.
The decor gave me a warm feeling right away. True, you’re not going to find a half-dozen varieties of obscure single origin coffees from as many countries, as you would a couple of blocks away, but there are chairs and stools, something Stumptown eschews. And food. And wine. And beer. And a lending library upstairs.
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Posted in Coffee!, New York | 2 Comments »
Tags: Ace Hotel, Birch Coffee, Coffee Labs Roasters, Coffee!, computers, drinks, espresso, Flatiron, Gershwin Hotel, Guatemala, India, Monsooned Malabar, Museum of Sex, Nicaragua, NYC, NYT, Stumptown
March 21, 2010
That was the first real winter we’ve had in New York City in a while, but I’m still glad to put the days of snow and winter jackets behind us. I’ve been engaged in a bit of apartment-organizing, having finally bit the bullet and paid for some storage space. There is some stuff we didn’t want underfoot but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. Some old computer equipment, some books, the comic collection from my misspent youth in the 1970s, my complete collection of Spy, furniture that we might put in a big summer house if we ever buy a big summer house. I fueled the weekslong effort with cups and shots of this coffee from Stumptown.
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Tags: Coffee!, drinks, espresso, NYC, Stumptown, Thumpology
March 6, 2010
Before I get to the latest installment of my endless coffee quest, I must mourn the end of my brief reign as a Twitter list maven. At the start of this week, I made the mistake of using the latest crashy build of Firefox while playing around on the Tlists site with my lists.
Because of a glitch, several of my lists, including the Linkers list, which had 1,940 followers and was among the top Twitter lists, briefly became “private” and shed all followers in the blink of an eye.
Alas, after some consultation, there seems to be nothing Tlists or Twitter can do. (But I am grateful that the Tlists folks are trying to help with a prominent placement of my list on their home page).
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Posted in Coffee!, New York | 1 Comment »
Tags: Coffee!, drinks, espresso, Stumptown, Twitter
November 15, 2009
Interesting things seem to be happening at one of my favorite New York coffee haunts, Café Grumpy. For one thing, the shop’s official blog is looking flashier and busier. And Grumpy — which turned me on to many of the best roasters in the country (Intelligentsia, Verve, Barismo, and Ritual) — is now roasting selected coffees of its own at its Brooklyn location.
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Posted in Coffee!, New York | 3 Comments »
Tags: Café Grumpy, Coffee!, drinks, espresso, Intelligentsia, Stumptown, Verve Coffee Roasters
October 25, 2009
I haven’t had much time to find new coffees lately. It has been a rather busy few weeks, with a trip to Cleveland related to “After Voices,” my wife’s new poetry chapbook from Burning River, a local press. We’ve also had illness in her family, grim news in the journalism world, birthday gatherings and more happenings than I can count. On the Cleveland trip, we hit the highlights, with readings and a visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. We also stopped in at the local indie coffee chain, Phoenix Coffee, which also roasts its own beans. I’m kicking myself for not picking some up on the way out of town. Luckily, I still had this (shrinking) bag of beans from Stumptown.
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Posted in Coffee!, New York | 4 Comments »
Tags: After Voices, Cleveland, Coffee!, espresso, Morgan Conservatory, music, Panama, Phoenix Coffee, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Stumptown, Visible Voice Books
October 11, 2009
I’ve enjoyed a number of Guatemalan coffees — the Finca La Folie from Ritual Roasters, Itzamna from Intelligentsia, the Nimac Kapeh and the Soma blend from Barismo — so I picked up these beans on another side trip to Stumptown’s Manhattan location at the Ace Hotel in the 20s. As always, the service was fast and pleasant, and I received a complimentary coffee because I was buying beans. (I was also playing around with Foursquare and its iPhone app, and discovered that there’s a fierce battle to become “mayor” of this location.)
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Posted in Coffee!, New York | 2 Comments »
Tags: Barismo, Coffee!, drinks, espresso, Foursquare, Guatemala, Intelligentsia, iPhone Apps, Stumptown, technology, Twitter
September 13, 2009
This direct-trade variety from Nicaragua was one of the earliest culinary coffees I wrote about on this blog, back in November 2008, when I first started to systematically evaluate the beans I was trying.
Back then, I thought I knew a fair amount about coffee, but I really didn’t know anything. My knowledge was limited to some basic presumptions I had about the geographic origins of various coffees. I didn’t know much about individual growers or roasters. That level of detail was not readily available on the Web or on packaging until this third-wave era of coffee geekery with its focus on elevations, how beans are grown, dried and roasted, and the precise temperature settings on super-expensive coffee-making equipment.
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Tags: Blogging, Café Grumpy, Coffee!, drinks, espresso, Flor Azul, Intelligentsia, Nicaragua, Ritual Coffee Roasters, Stumptown, Verve Coffee Roasters
September 12, 2009
People I know who have spent time in the Portland area have raved about Stumptown Coffee for years. They roast the beans right in the store! Nothing on the East Coast compares! So after the second-day-of-school parents’ breakfast on Friday, my wife and I tagged along through the rain when another parent suggested we walk over to the new Stumptown outlet in the Ace Hotel in an area that some people are trying to call SoMa (for “South of Macy’s”) in the high 20s off Broadway.
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Posted in Coffee!, New York | 8 Comments »
Tags: Café Grumpy, Costa Rica, Jura-Capresso Impressa F9 Espresso Machine, Posterous, SoMa, Stumptown, Twitter, WiFi
It was painful to pass so close to Stumptown at the Ace Hotel without stopping, but I was glad I did, finding myself off the lobby of another boutique hotel, the Gershwin, in a different temple to caffeine — Birch Coffee. I had been wanting to visit after noticing it on The Times’s list of the best of the new coffee cafes. It was love at first visit. 
