#65 - 16 Ounces of Sin

16 Ounces of Sin

7/28/05 (#65)

I recently attended a great outdoor house party/birthday party/music show, and it gave me an opportunity to indulge in my drink and drug of choice---caffeine. I never get to watch bands while drinking coffee, because bars don't let you bring in your own beverages and I refuse indulge in any bar's brewed-by-obligation coffee-esque liquid, the neglected pot sitting on the burner since the Clinton administration, offered simply to comply with modern designated driver formalities. Buying coffee at a bar is like buying lunch at a bait shop, so I was thrilled to indulge in a professionally made espresso concoction while enjoying great music.

I live in North Portland, and the party was in Vancouver, and there is little between my house and the house party except a long bridge and the mixed-use retail facility called Jantzen Beach. I was running late, so I stopped at the one coffee shop I knew of that was en route to the bash, a Starbucks. Three minutes and three dollars later, I was heading to the party.

In my first few minutes, one individual greeted me with a scoffing expression of haughty superiority for tainting the party with the green and white logo of the CSA (Corporate State of America.) No inquiry into why I had chosen the brand, no investigation of what was actually in the cup, just a righteous, "Awww, Bill" accompanied by a recoiling that would have been appropriate if I had smilingly arrived carrying a fresh sample of freeway road kill.

To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cup of coffee is just a cup of coffee. I know people who, when I intimate that our current President is an inarticulate, uncharismatic puppet for the agenda of the Republican National Committee, immediately infer from this small bit of information that I am hiding a "Hilary in 2008" button beneath my overcoat and that I list Ted Kennedy as the ideal of a great American leader. It is tempting for folks to delineate the world to simplest categories, be it Us vs. Them, Right vs. Left, Rich vs. Poor---and for some, Starbucks vs. Stumptown.

My Dad (who does not think I wear a "Hilary in 2008" button on my shirt, but does suspect I have it tacked to my bulletin board at home) taught me a very valuable lesson when I was younger: Keep your money local. It's great advice: support your own community, not some corporate office in Reston, Virginia or Irvine, California. Spend money locally and it goes to employing people locally, and those people go out to eat at local restaurants and tip local waiters and they in turn go out and buy drinks at local bars, and the money stays circulating in your own neighborhoods. I am a firm believer in this concept, and I practice what I preach: I don't shop at WalMart (though I admit that Target, where I do shop, might be the Democrat's version of Walmart's Republicanism), I eat exclusively at locally-owned restaurants (fresher, better food), and if someone would read my resume and bring me in for an interview, I'd love to work for a small local firm that employs talented local people. I don't preach, and I don't like being preached to----I am an intelligent person, and I know that Starbucks sells scientifically homogenized coffee products.

And before I get to the particular cup of coffee in question, let me praise Stumptown. They seem rabidly "local" (bless their hearts), they almost always make great drinks, and they made this story possible:

Sage and I went to the Stumptown on Division street after shopping at Trade-Up music, my favorite local music store. (Guitar Center has better prices, and sometimes that's an important consideration, but Trade-Up is worthy of my support.) Sage, not yet three, always gets hot chocolate, and the man making the drinks moved his tools down and over to her direct line of sight so that she could watch him make her beverage, and he theatrically exaggerated every step, including a comically-fevered stirring of the drink. (She was delighted---and as a rule, make points with my daughter and you make points with me.) He finishes, gives me my latte and the cocoa, and I hand him my Visa. "I'm sorry, we're cash and check only." I had no cash, no check, and suddenly had visions of tearing Sage away from her personalized hot chocolate because her plasticized Daddy didn't carry any archaic forms of payment. "Just bring it back when you can", the barista offered. I thanked him, assuring him that I would be back as soon as I could with the six dollars. "Whenever. Tomorrow is fine, whenever you come back is fine." I live in North Portland---I had never been to this shop---and this guy was treating me as if he knew I was good for it. (Which I was, and it felt lovely to be treated that way.) I don't think anyone at Starbucks would have said, "Oh, whenever. Enjoy your drinks." 30 minutes and a well-deserved tip later, my lay-away purchase at Stumptown was complete.

So Stumptown Coffee rocks, I know that. Yet, some of their lattes are better than others, and that's where Starbucks has most folks beat---like McDonald's, their homogenized coffee products are a known commodity when you walk through the door. Order a latte and it will not be better, or worse, than the previous ten or hundred lattes you bought there in the past. I love to support local coffee houses, but I hate when I spend three bucks, wait 8 minutes for it to cool down, then learn that the woman working the bar doesn't know how to make a drink. (Or worse, indignantly insists that she does know how and refuses to accept that the stale, watery, foamless thing she has just served is to lattes what a cellophane-wrapped brownie found on the shelf of the Kwiki-mart is to desserts.)

Cut back to the party. I was so late that I had already missed one band, and yet here was some rogue passing judgment because I didn't drive 6 to 12 miles out of my way to support a local coffee house. North Portland is hardly a hotbed of local brewers (much to my chagrin), and my choices were basically one corporation or another (Starbucks is an easy target, but is 7-11 worthy of my support?) A.J. Java was already closed, I didn't know the hours of the place in St. Johns, so I did what any reasonable adult would do: I got the coffee where I knew the coffee was available. Idealism is lovely, but it has difficult office hours. No way was I going to miss Roaring Lions' set simply because no local shop has noted the vast changes in North Portland's demographic and seen fit to open doors in my district.

If Stumptown opened in NoPo, I'd spend most of my spare dollars on their drinks. If I find any local coffee house that stays open for the evening addicts, and their shots are pulled with care, I'll support them. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to eat locally, shop locally, and live locally---and occasionally suckle from the udder of that ubiquitous corporate cash cow. Because sometimes, a cup of coffee is just a cup of coffee.

©2005 wpreagan