Well, we had an action packed day on our first day in Portland. We started out with a trip to the newly opened BARISTA. Jake and I had shots of Stumptown’s Hairbender and then we all shared a vac pot of a natural processed Ethiopian roasted by Ecco Cafe. BARISTA had a great vac pot set up with Hario heaters. The Ethiopian from Ecco Cafe was tasty. Lots of berry notes. Next we walked to Coffeehouse Northwest. We were deep into conversation though and walked eight blocks out of the way and had to turn around but it was a gorgeous day at about 50 degrees so it was worth it. At Coffeehouse Northwest we enjoyed a couple Eva Solos. One was an Ethiopian and the other was a Burundi both roasted by Stumptown. I really enjoyed the Burundi. It had some great tea like qualites with some lemon sweetness and a really clean finish. The atomosphere at Coffeehouse Northwest was great and the staff really seemed to know there stuff. Ok, so at that point we had had too much coffee and not enough food. So we headed to Russell’s BBQ. Great bbq, good beer and our server was really cool and told us some sweet places to check out in Portland. From there we headed to the convention center to drop off some of our gear and bug Chris from Alliance because we knew he was doing his practice time.
After chilling at the convention center for a while we decided to follow the advice of our BBQ friend and headed out to find the gorge. We ended up finding a sweet water fall called Mulanomah Falls. I believe its the second largest running water fall in the US. Since we were there we decided to climb to the top of it. Which proved to be quite the hike and the view proved to be well worth it. On the way back down we got dumped on with rain. Again well worth it. From there we headed back to downtown Portland, picked up Tom from Alliance who is crashin with us. The group then decided it was time to hit a Stumptown so we drove over to the Ace Hotel location. We all enjoyed A+ macchiattos (except Stacy, she enjoyed a spicy chai) and enjoyed watching the Mistrals in action. Taking us back to a time when we worked on a Mirage. Ahhh. Anyhow from there we wondered over to the Rogue Brewery and had dinner. Ryan enjoyed what he said was the best winter ale he’s ever had.
At this point we’re pretty much wiped out. So we headed back to the motel and made a plan for aquiring our competition gear from FedEx tomorrow. Probably the most dramatic part of the day was finding out our competition gear wouldn’t arrive till tomorrow. Which poses a problem since Ryan’s practice time was tomorrow at 7am. However, our good friend and competitor Mike Phillips from Intelligentsia switched practice slots with Ryan and bought us another hour. Jake worked his magic on the phone with FedEx and we are going to attempt to intercept our packages tomorrow morning at 6am. This is what competition is all about folks.
That’s a wrap for day one. Tomorrow Ryan will be competing at 1pm PST. You can watch it live at www.usbc2009.com. cheers

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