- The very first coffee I ever had was a Starbucks coffee.

My - Earliest coffee memory was the old coffee people.

- I think my earliest memory is with my grandfather.

- I grew up just knowing about Vietnamese iced coffee.

What kid doesn't like sweet?

We didn't - Know how to order coffee, so we just ordered espresso.

That probably wasn't the best drink for a sixth - Grader, and I think I ordered actually a cappuccino, which I did not enjoy.

The first time I had it, my dad gave me an espresso shot and just like poured it over ice cream and it was like the most magical, magical thing - For me.

Coffee is ultimately about connection with, with the folks you're drinking with.

Even bad coffee, sorry, Folgers.

- Whether it's home brewed, pulled as an espresso shot or mixed into a decadent drink.

People love coffee in the US alone.

We drink almost 500 million cups each day.

And while coffee has grown in much sunnier places than Oregon for more than a century, the Pacific Northwest has been key to shaping the global coffee culture.

This is the story of what coffee means to the northwest and what the northwest means to coffee.

- So sometimes the cooler, the more settled it is, the better.

So go back through a second time if you haven't been through.

- This is an ultra premium natural processed black Jaguar geisha.

It's a coffee grown by the Hartman estate in Panama and it's sold at auction for a staggering $2,000 a pound, but some Pacific Northwest coffee fans are competing for the chance to drink it for free, and that includes a local coffee icon.

- I love it so much that it, it makes me happy.

These are happy tears.

- For more than 20 years, Phuong Tran has been a leader in the Pacific Northwest Coffee community, but the transition from coffee drinker to cafe owner wasn't easy.

- I bought lava Java as a side hustle, but then I fell in love with it and I became my full-time career.

I didn't have any experience.

I started out just learning about how to even make coffee.

I didn't know how to make coffee.

I would go open the shop, stay there for an hour or two, and then I'd go to my full-time job and then I'd come back and close the shop with the staff - While Phuong Tran was doing double duty, working her job in it and at the cafe, she was also immersing herself into coffee culture.

- Once I started learning about coffee, I was like, there's so much more to coffee than just making coffee, but even making coffee, there's, there's procedures, there's certain way, - And her journey included an interest in an emerging barista competition, which had started just a few years earlier, - Going to a trade show, seeing a barista competition and telling myself, wow, this is how coffee's made.

I realized that when you compete the competition, everybody follows the same policy rules and guidelines and that was how I wanted to learn how to make coffee.

- It took only a few months before Phuong Tran was competing and also winning.

- To my surprise, I was like, wow.

Second place.

I was so close.

So, so then I went and compete in 2005 - And then you - Won, and then I won the nationals.

- Today Phuong Tran is a pillar of the specialty coffee world and still passionate about sharing her love of coffee with the people around her.

- Boom trade actually helped incubate a lot of the Portland coffee roasters and coffee shops in town.

A lot of those owners started at boom shop and she taught 'em how to make coffee and taught 'em how to take coffee seriously.

And so it's really fitting and fun that she pulled - Our love of coffee can be traced back centuries as legend has it.

A ninth century goat herder named Kaldi was first to discover coffee, noticing his herd became restless after eating the red berries of a specific tree summary, tellings of the legend, even say his goats were dancing in the moonlight, it would take nearly a thousand more years for coffee to make its way here to the Pacific Northwest.

Starting in 15th century, Yemen coffee first made its way through Egypt, Syria, and Turkey then spread across Europe and into the Americas by the 18th century.

But it was the 1773 Boston Tea Party that marked a turning point for the bean in the us.

The revolt against the heavy tax on tea gave way to coffee's rise in popularity.

Portland has been a coffee city since the 1850s when a small coffee tea and spice trade started to emerge and the drink started to catch on.

In 1909, Fred G. Meyer began selling coffee from a horse drawn cart to workers at farms and lumber camps.

By the mid 1950s, coffee started to become a household staple.

- First wave of coffee is generally considered the commercial coffees that your parents or grandparents might have had, like a the can of Folgers.

- We all remember the commercials for - This.

- By the sixties and seventies, coffee drinkers started looking for more from their cup of Joe seeking out complex flavors beyond the coffee can.

- Second wave would be the pioneering efforts of early, you know, Petes and Starbucks to bring a really dark roast coffee and bring something more distinct to the American palate that completely transformed coffee in the United States and was the advent of specialty coffee, the sourcing, the roasting, and the introduction of coffee drinks like lattes.

I mean, no one was drinking that prior to those companies.

- In the eighties and nineties, coffee culture shifted again, focusing less on the roast and more on the quality of the coffee bean itself.

Iconic Oregon roasters like Coffee People came on the scene during this time, but there are three roasters that came to define coffee's Third wave.

Chicago's intelligentsia counterculture from North Carolina and Portland's own Stumptown Coffee Roasters.

- Stumptown was founded in 1999 with a single cafe out on Southeast Division, and that was the original roastery and cafe.

It was a former hair salon called Hair Bender, and that became the name of our signature blend that we used for espresso in all of our cafes and then grew in the following years to have an additional cafe in southeast at Belmont, downtown, and then spread to New York.

- At the same time a coffee pricing crisis was brewing.

Vietnam had emerged as a coffee powerhouse, flooding the market with cheap low grade beans, pushing the global commodities market rate to the lowest point in a century.

- Farms in, you know, all over the world were struggling to survive.

There just wasn't any money coming in.

People didn't have a way to earn, to earn money to sell their coffee, - But Stumptown saw a way they could support the farms directly by cutting out the middleman.

So direct trade was about having access to some of the best coffees in the world and then also just going circumventing a system that wasn't working, going directly to the farms with a level of transparency, with a level of visibility to the farm level.

That was pretty uncommon.

When you go to more of a stable pricing model, producers are more able to invest.

It makes a huge difference for the communities that are producing.

Coffee beans are important, but so is how they're roasted.

It's an art unto itself.

- We have here are samples from the rusting machines and we're going to smell those.

The dry fragrance, we have a score sheet that we use and we're going to evaluate that dry fragrance and then after we put water on and let them steep for four minutes and a crust is formed across the top, you know, break back across with a spoon and there are aromatics that are trapped in that crust that you want to get down and smell as they're released.

And then we'll scrape all those flavia off the top of it and let it cool and we'll taste the coffee liquor from warm until cold and then go out the rest of that evaluation form.

- The process is tactile, sensory, and analog.

Something important because it's how coffees are evaluated all around the world from a roastery in the Pacific Northwest to a farm in Ethiopia.

And it's this human process and commitment to quality that propelled Stumptown success and helped to keep Portland on the coffee map.

- We do have a lot of people who've been here for a really long time, and so all of that kind of analog experience of learning the roasting style from the early days and the espresso, you know, the style of espresso that we're known for and the sourcing, of course the of the raw ingredients that go into all of that.

- But before that, coffee ends up in your cup before it even gets roasted and it has to make its way to Portland.

- I started Costa Oro with the, the personal dream of finding a link back to Costa Rica where I lived as an exchange student after high school.

There wasn't a distribution hub for green coffee here in Oregon.

- Most unroasted coffee comes to the west coast via the Bay Area, and before Costa Oro it was up to the roaster to figure out how to get it home to Portland - By not having to ship it from another region.

They save incredible resources.

Currently we are sitting at about 76,000 bags - For the layman, that's between four and a half and 5 million pounds of green coffee.

And a warehouse like this connects every part of the coffee supply chain.

We - Work with growers, we work with exporters, we work with shippers, customs clearance, the importers and all the roasters, large and small, even up to the coffee shops.

- Once the coffee's at Costa Oro, it's just a matter of time before it's on the way to a local roaster.

Located in inner southeast Portland, Buckman Coffee Factory is a co-hosting facility and an incubator of sorts for small coffee businesses.

- It's extremely expensive and also a little bit intimidating I think, to enter the coffee business.

We have a lot of women who are actually roasting in this space, people of color who are roasting in this space and I think sometimes there can be a little bit of a hurdle just getting into any new industry or being a small business owner.

We - Try to get people on the machine roasting so that intimidating part is not there and they understand just the mechanics of it would be like, just like cooking, you have to be in the kitchen doing your thing - And like cooking there is a basic recipe for roasting coffee, but each roaster still puts their own spin on the process.

- Coffee before we roast it, it's green, it's actually the seed inside of a cherry.

As you're roasting the seed itself starts to change color and you can smell the different phases of the roast essentially.

So it'll go from like a pale green to like a brighter grassy green, then it starts to turn yellow and then it'll start to turn a little bit browner.

So it'll look like a light crust on a bread.

It'll enter its first crack, which is moisture releasing from the bean and it pops out and you, you hear it just like a popcorn popper.

Anytime after that is when you would stop your roast.

- We have some folks who have been roasting at home popcorn popper and are, you know, wanting to roast just a little bit more.

Then we have other folks who maybe have been running a cafe but want to reduce their costs and so they decided to to start roasting their own - Folks like Kia Booker and her husband Martin.

- I have been a barista since I moved to Portland almost 20 years ago and I've worked at some of the best shops in town.

I just really, really enjoying the coffee culture.

- They started with a small subscription coffee service, - But then he kind of came to me and said, I want you to be more involved.

You have such a gift in terms of your coffee knowledge and and how you connect to coffee.

I want that to be more a part of this business.

So I said, okay, and I really wanted to create sort of a different narrative of what it could look like to be a roaster.

- The change in roaster also came with a shift in focus to include social and environmental justice in their business philosophy.

- We had a business advisor that was like, your prices are too low for everything that you sell.

Like they're too too low.

You're never going to make money, you're not going to be sustainable.

And I was like, but I want people like us to be able to afford our coffee.

We're not trying to be some like high end coffee shop.

I think that everybody deserves some good quality stuff and I don't want to outprice our customers.

- Kia created an equity pricing model to give customers three different options of what they can pay for a bag of beans.

- I was thinking about reparations to be honest.

I was thinking about reparations, I was thinking about how do people kind of acknowledge the disparities in access to opportunities.

- In the summer of 2023, Kia and Martin's coffee transitioned again from a subscription only model to opening a pop-up cafe at the Lloyd Center Mall.

- The thing that's been so brilliant and beautiful about being here at Lloyd Center is our customer demographic has completely changed and that has been like the kind of cherry on top, just the ability to like see people that look like me as our customers.

- Coffee drinkers come from all walks of life, same with the folks who make your coffee and once a year more than 12,000 coffee fans from around the globe get together for what's considered the world's fair of coffee, - Fresh, fresh - Ink.

So it's a pretty, you know, innovative technology and a different way to think about brewing coffee.

- And we brought some of our very wonderful and very special coffee from [Indistinct].

- This machine makes the best coffee of all.

- The expo was also home to the 2023 US Coffee Championships where people from across the country compete in the coffee arts.

One of the most competitive categories is the US Barista Championship.

Three coffee courses, one with milk, an espresso, and a signature beverage made in just 15 minutes.

All judged on taste, presentation and technical skill.

To prepare entrants, select a theme, write a script and source and roast their own coffee beans before they can even start practicing.

- Four to five months before competition, you're thinking about what coffees you want to use.

You're reaching out to producers, you are tasting, you are starting to think about what's my theme?

What's, what's the one sentence I want the judges to walk away with at the end of these 15 minutes that comes down to practice.

I need to know my routine front and back.

I need to be able to do this with people talking around me, with people interrupting me.

It needs to be so ridiculously rehearsed.

It turns into a full-time job pretty quickly of spending 20 to 30 hours every week just running this routine - And the training doesn't stop once you step away from the machine, - Even when you're not physically there in a lab training, like you're training, you're, you're thinking about it, it becomes all consuming at the end.

I grew up in a family that doesn't drink coffee and they still don't to this day, and so me going to coffee shops was kind of my teenage rebellion.

I kind of had this curiosity of like, well, I kind of want to do this someday.

I want to like learn what the baristas are doing.

But also there was this whole menu of drinks that I was discovering and so that's kind of how I got started.

I think I got hired my, my freshman year of college and from there I've been in the industry ever since.

- It's an industry where she's carved out a niche that's uniquely her own, both as a barista competitor and a coffee content creator under the handle "Morgan Drinks Coffee" her videos reach millions of people on platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

- It's still very shocking to me to sometimes like think about the number of people that want to engage with things that I'm making.

The internet feels very loud sometimes and so it makes me really happy to be able to make content that is a little bit quieter.

- In addition to the silent film, like sketches and videos of new drink creations, Morgan's accounts also document the ramp up to the US Barista Championships.

- I would like to - Introduce...

In 2022, Morgan took home the top honor and title of us barista Champion earning her a spot on the world stage in which she placed second.

The following year on her home turf in Portland, she won runner-up.

- It's just a moment of like we're all doing our absolute best, you know, to showcase coffee like collectively.

In that moment on stage, it's about serving coffee.

- Some competitors are laser focused on their category while others want to dabble in a little bit of everything.

Wenbo who goes by, Joe grew up in China - In that time, China doesn't have a lot good coffee culture for people.

- In 2017, Joe moved to Portland and opened his own specialty coffee shop and roastery - After research, I feel Portland is the the best coffee city in the US because they have a lot independent coffee shop here, not like a chain company.

- Years later, a new technology caught his eye.

- So right now I'm the kind the chief coffee officer at for the archery coffee.

Yeah, it's like the robotic coffee company.

- Artley is a Seattle based tech startup that builds robotic baristas as the chief coffee officer.

Joe roasts all the coffee that's used and created the recipes for the specialty drinks.

He's also the model for their barista bots, which use AI learning to help them mimic the actions of human baristas.

- All the robots, they just copied my motion.

I train the robot to pour latte to all the kind of the flow, the right flow to make the Good Cup coffee - And the barista bot's coffee is good.

Just not as good as Joe Yang's.

Yet.

- To be honest, we are still in the progress to let the robots make it better than me.

Yeah, but right now because I'm too good, just joking.

Yeah, yeah.

- Coffee has come in waves from the commoditized cup of Joe to a focus on the roast to where the beans come from and now fully exploring what this little seed can do.

So what will the next wave of coffee look like?

There will be new technologies.

- I don't feel like robots are going to take over barista's job because a barista is so much more than just making the coffee.

There's this, there's this personal connection that a robot can't offer - And we'll continue to search for that elusive, perfect roast.

- I want to see other people like us that are just like either home roasters, just really not out to kind of conquer the world, but just want to give people some goodness.

I want those people to be able to thrive.

- Yeah, we humans have a very strong relationship with the coffee plant.

It does give people the what they need to face the day.

But no matter how you brew it, where you drink it, or if you take it black or with a little cream and sugar, these rainy northwest days will always pair perfectly with a hot cup of coffee.