The Portland Daily Sun has published an interview with the owner of Matt’s Wood Roasted Coffee about the coffee shop he’s opening on Congress Street,
“We’ll be doing some interesting stuff with coffee, some different ways of brewing it. We have an interesting espresso machine,” he said.
“There will be a coffee lab in the back of this space, with a sample roaster, I’ll be doing some sample roasting on site,” Bolinder said.
and an article about the number of coffee shops in Portland.
Yet some worry that, like a second pot of coffee brewed from old grounds, the market may be weakening. Are customers facing too many choices without adequate demand?
“I’ve got seven on my block, and they never used to be here,” complained one proprietor about the sudden emergence of coffee shops in a small stretch of downtown Portland. “So everybody wants to be in the coffee business.”
Seven on one block? What a load of crap that claim is. I know no block in Portland that has more than two true coffeehouses on it. And many coffeehouses are blocks from the next nearest coffeehouse, i.e. Hilltop is quite a distance away from CBD on India Street which is the bnext nearest coffeehouse, and even the Old Port doesn’t have that many coffeehouses in the entire area!
I had the same reaction to the “seven one on block” claim. I suppose that if you apply some especially fuzzy math (and take the area starting with Starbucks on Congress and stretch it down Monument Square and then cut down to where Arabica and Dunkin Donuts are) you MIGHT come up with seven places that—under the broadest of definitions might qualify as “coffee shops”—. But even that is a bit of a stretch, and it certainly constitutes more than one block.
By the way, I picked up a bag of Matt’s Coffee (Map 40 Mokha Java) from Rosemont Brighton yesterday. Best coffee I’ve ever made at home.