Barista

539 Northwest 13th Avenue

SPECIALTY

Barista is a specialty coffee shop located in Portland. Check in here with the Pulled Coffee app to earn real cash rewards. Specialty shops count toward all challenges including Pulled 50, Pulled 100, and Pulled 300.

Barista sits on NW 13th in the Pearl District, in a historic building with the smallest footprint of any of the Barista cafes. It opened in 2009 as the first Barista, and it ran a model that was new at the time: multiple top roasters on the same bar instead of one house roast. That model since spread across the city. The Pearl shop stays grab-and-go by design, with indoor counter space and a few outdoor seats on 13th. Hours run six to six on weekdays, seven on weekends. The bar still rotates through whatever the team is most interested in pouring that week. Order whatever the chalkboard names as the espresso of the week if you came for the multi-roaster program. Order a pour-over of one of the rotating lighter roasts if you came to taste what Portland is shipping right now.

About Portland

Portland built its specialty register on roasters who never moved off the Eastside. Stumptown Coffee Roasters opened on SE Division in 1999 and set the city template for the decade that followed. Coava Coffee Roasters opened in 2008 in a Matt Higgins garage, then moved into the working roastery and Public Brew Bar at 1015 SE Main, a block off the Hawthorne Bridge. Roseline opened in 2011 on SE 11th across from Kachka, with a second cafe on NE Alberta in Concordia. Water Avenue Coffee runs a downtown shop at 1300 SW 5th and the original flagship across the river on SE Water Avenue with a vintage French Samiac drum roaster.

The neighborhood map covers most of the city. Central Eastside and Buckman hold the working roasteries. Hawthorne, Division, and Sellwood-Brooklyn run the slower neighborhood bars. Alberta and Concordia in Northeast carry the second-wave Eastside cafes. The Pearl District covers the Italian and downtown register through Caffe Umbria on NW 12th, which opened in December 2007. Foster-Powell holds Space Monkey Coffee on the corner of SE 72nd and Foster, anchoring that quadrant since 2004.

Portland is also the city where the multi-roaster bean bar started. Barista on NW 13th opened in 2009 in a Pearl District storefront and ran multiple top roasters on the same bar instead of one house roast. The model spread across the city. The result is a market where most serious cafes pour two or three rotating roasters and the bar conversation rotates with them.