Coffee . . . Black, White, and Green

Friday morning’s news that the bankrupt Seattle coffee chain Tully’s had been purchased by an investment group that includes Patrick Dempsey, the star of “Grey’s Anatomy” (often referred to as “Dr. McDreamy”) brought up a lot of coffee-related thoughts and memories.

Coffee is ubiquitous in our jacked-in, high-tech world. Local stores and national chains are routinely mobbed every weekday morning before people settle down to their PCs and cubicles; then again at mid-morning breaks, at noon, and even after quitting time. Apparently, many teens and even pre-teens get a daily caffeine fix.

I did not grow up drinking coffee. I have no idea whether my parents ever drank it. I know we had tea from my mother’s Japanese upbringing. I vaguely remember my father liked a roasted-grain substitute for coffee called Postum.

When I was a kid, I associated coffee with the Folgers ads that had “Mrs. Olson” purring “it’s the richest kind” about the “mountain grown, for better flavor” brand. Coffee was just a thing that grownups drank; a bit stodgy and a lot less cool than cigarettes (which didn’t interest me, either). You pictured commercial coffee bulbs and squat white mugs in greasy spoon restaurants and church kitchens.

I was out of college before I drank any coffee, and that was only for the specific stimulant effect in an emergency, when I was really dragging at the office at age 23 or 24 . . . because it tasted so bad. You could probably count the number of cups I ingested before the age of 30 on the fingers of one hand.

Though the original Starbucks wholesale business opened in Seattle in 1971, it didn’t start to spread out of town until the late 1980s. The chain only got to selling retail cups of joe across the Pacific Northwest in 1988-89, when I was a reporter for the Roseburg, Oregon News-Review. I still hadn’t developed a taste for the stuff.

So I must have been settled in Portland in the early 1990s before I developed a taste for coffee drinks -- preferably with a syrup flavoring. Over the years I’ve ordered many vanilla, hazelnut, almond, caramel, cinnamon, crème brulee, irish cream, toffee nut, pumpkin, gingerbread, and other lattés . . . from a variety of outlets.

For a while I was a regular at Coffee People on NW 23rd (gone). The Anne Hughes Coffee room (also gone) was the place to sip at Powell’s Books. That became World Cup, which also opened a really nice place at NW 18th and Glisan (still there!). Another favorite was a Seattle’s Best Coffee outlet downtown when I worked nearby.

I’ve also had a cup of coffee in many other places around Portland: Urban Grind on NE Oregon (gone), Artemis Café at SE 12th and Division (gone), Pix Patisserie on North Williams (moved, apparently), Coffee House Northwest on West Burnside, Lovejoy Bakers and Cloud Seven Café in the Pearl, St. Honoré Boulangerie on NW Thurman, at least three different Stumptown Coffee outlets, several Peet’s, Café Velo, Costello’s Travel Caffe, Common Grounds on SE Hawthorne, and many others I probably have forgotten.

As for Tully’s, they had a store on NW 23rd that was farther from our condo than the big Coffee People at NW 23rd and Hoyt, and at least two Starbucks, so I only got to the Tully’s occasionally. When I worked for the City of Lake Oswego (circa 1999-2004), however, there was a Tully’s right across the street, so I spent a lot of time (and dollars) in that one.

Of course my wife and I grind beans at home and brew our own, caffeinated and decaffeinated, with lots of half ’n’ half. Grownups didn’t really do that back in the 1950s and 1960s, did they? It was all ground and freeze dried mix, I believe. At times, I’ve cut back on commercial flavored lattés because they run into money and the syrups and foam are fattening. Sometimes, I think of quitting coffee for a while, just to see if the world looks and feels different.

Recently, Starbucks has enveloped Coffee People, Seattle’s Best, Torrefazione and other chains I’ve patronized. Starbucks now has more than 18,000 stores in 60 countries. The company will open its first store in Vietnam, one of the biggest growers of coffee beans in the world, next month.

The satire in “Best In Show,” in which Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock talk about the Starbucks across the street from each other, isn’t far from the truth. As corporations go, it’s not a bad one; a number of my young actor colleagues have been baristas at Starbucks outlets. For coffee, it’s handy, dependable, and usually fast (except for the one in the Safeway directly below our apartment!).

But apparently Starbucks still wants to duel Patrick Dempsey for Tully’s. I’m rooting for the bogus physician.