绝对最好的咖啡在波特兰,马ine

ThePortland, Mainethat Mary Allen Lindemann and Alan Spear gambled on, way back in 1994, was a very different city than the Portland, Maine we know today. When the duo opened their firstcoffeeshop on a seedy stretch of Congress Street, which they will tell you used to be known colloquially as the Porn District, the downtown of Maine’s largest city was dangerously close to half-empty, saddled with a now-unimaginable 40% vacancy rate. There was no bright future assured, no sure thing to point toward, not yet—this was a time, you may recall, when the average American simply did notdodowntown, not unless absolutely necessary.

但是，Lindemann和Spear相信。在波特兰，咖啡的力量发展社区。四分之一世纪后，波特兰是美国最容易欣赏的城市之一，设计咖啡是波特兰最受欢迎的咖啡提供商之一。在最近的一个星期一，考虑到外面的天气同样受到启发的早晨，我想到了一杯闪闪发光的哥伦比亚人，我可以明白为什么。这是一件非常复杂的事情 - 克里斯普（Crisp），但也很果味，几乎在味蕾上跳舞，舌头上的舌头刺痛了矿物质的热门，假设头脑没有在我身上扮演技巧。这是您可能想在夏季下午在游泳池旁喝的咖啡，而其他所有人都喝了冰冷的桃红葡萄酒，这是多么令人耳目一新。

事实证明，这个特殊的宝石已经从一个小小的finca，比足球场小，深处是一个偏僻的土著人民预备役，这是一支球队去年访问哥伦比亚时遇到的。要说，设计认真对待采购的咖啡就是温和地说。他们对可持续性的热情，特别是对种植者公平工资的热情，与一些最著名的行业领导者有关。在2016年，CBD似乎在这里称他们为附近，加入了一群越来越多的咖啡烘焙商，该咖啡烘烤者被认证为B公司，预计该公司将在社会和环境责任方面遵守严格的问责制。

There are now four Coffee By Design shops in the area, which is plenty, considering Portland’s modest size, and my stop at their Diamond Street flagship, out in an industrial corner of the city’s East End, was just one of stops I would be making that day, as part of my research for the next edition of Food & Wine’sBest Coffee in Every State民意调查。

您可能期望从一个城市有这么多黑暗,cold days on the annual calendar, there’s no shortage of coffee in Portland. Who, however, was doing it best, or better than most? To answer that question, I scheduled stops at five prominent local roasters: Tandem Coffee, Coffee by Design, Bard Coffee, Speckled Ax, and Rwanda Bean, as well as the following shops where fine coffee was said to be sold: Coffee ME Up, Little Woodfords, Union Bagel and Rose Foods.

What makes a winner? You can read more on the process both这里and这里, but briefly: I will typically visit anonymously, preferring to experience each shop the way any consumer would. I will, however, order as many drinks as I can without attracting too much attention, in order to learn as much as possible.. Often, and this was frequently the case in Portland, these visits are mere spot checks on places I’m already quite familiar with—in some cases I’ll have visited many times before. After nine stops in one memorable and educational day, here are the four I’d recommend most highly, right now.

One of the most fashionable roasters in New England right now, the one pretty much everybody in the coffee industry under the age of 40 will immediately reference when you talk about Maine, this labor of love from Blue Bottle grads Will and Kathleen Pratt has been a star of the Portland scene since 2012. While the vintage service station on Congress Street is far and away the most popular place for Tandem’s loyal fans—both local and visiting from elsewhere—to pay tribute, I prefer the diminutive cafe space inside Tandem’s modest, East End roasting plant. Here, underneath the big Colonial-style windows, soaking up the morning light if you’re lucky, you feel as if you’re part of the family, rather than unwitting fodder for somebody’s Instagram feed,并不是说那有什么问题。我访问之际的选择很简单，首先是一杯斯托克（Stoker），他们的“有点黑暗”的混合物，设计为一种福音派工具，是一种伸出的手，伸出了邓肯（Dunkin）痴迷的新英格兰人。This is a thoroughly enjoyable, very straightforward coffee, one of the most balanced I’ve tried from the new wave of dark-ish roasts, and I had plenty of time to think about how much I liked the stuff while the conscientious barista worked to dial in the day’s espresso, a Colombian from estimable producer Astrid Medina. Three tries later, I’d say both my shot and cappuccino came out fine, if still short of the mark. I’d have happily waited around for perfection, in order to experience what was clearly a spectacular coffee at its very best, but the morning rush had already begun.

So close to Tandem’s East End roastery you could throw a coffee bean and hit one from the other, CBD’s sizable Diamond Street flagship is already a hive of activity around nine o’clock on a Monday morning. Stepping in here is like stepping back a decade or more, in terms of shop design—concrete floors, accent walls in warm, rich 1990s tones, an abundance of local art on the walls. (This location only opened in 2014, as it happens.) There is nothing old-fashioned, however, about some of their coffees—as described above, the Finca El Llano Colombian was one of the finest cups of coffee I have tried since the2019年调查was released in March. Pity then, that a double espresso and a frill-free cappuccino barely merited a second glance.

自2009年以来，这很容易成为城市旧港口区的访客咖啡烘焙师和咖啡馆经营，这是绝对一切的核心。我很久以前就失去了我在这家商店里走了多少次的踪迹，并且不记得我不感到满意的时候。Today was no exception, though here, for the first time that day, espresso outshone cups of coffee (I tried two here, and while they were absolutely fine, neither were really competing with what I’d just had.) After years of experience, Bard remains one of the city’s most dependable destinations for a proper espresso drink.

在波特兰的一部分中，大多数休闲访客通常不会遇到，至少起初没有，这种开朗的多人乘坐自2017年以来一直在其附近服务，努力达到我从未在任何非罗斯特上都没有观察到的标准镇上的商店。另外，这个人对寻找其他城市和州喝咖啡也没有任何疑问，这在家乡波特兰很稀有。可以这么说，煮沸的苏门答腊是某种形式的，我说是的，我想尝试一些 - 这是一天中第二杯绝对是史诗般的杯子，这是如此多汁，如此甜蜜和特别的东西。就是那个really菠萝我正在品尝吗？值得关注的知识渊博的咖啡师为了我的利益而挥舞着包包，这是品尝笔记上的第一名：菠萝。(I’m not that good at tasting notes, to be honest—try this coffee, and you’ll see for yourself, the flavor is awfully hard to miss.) Grown in Sumatra’s lush, volcanic Kerinci Valley, this thrilling honey process coffee (read more about that这里）将已经独特的苏门答腊咖啡带到了一个新的，完全令人愉悦的水平。事实证明，烘焙师是新兴的Vivid, in northern Vermont. As luck would have it, my next destination.