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Weed and coffee are besties for a reason. Fortunately we live in arguably the greatest city in the world to consume them both, with a plethora of excellent roasters and friendly recreational weed shops in every neighborhood. Countless flavor pairings are suggested by strains and styles, but my favorite coffee-and-weed pairing is one that speaks to where I'm at on any given day. Done right, this style of consumption has its own cadence—like smoking weed and drinking coffee in time with my circadian rhythm.
Related: Welcome to the Brave New World of Cannabis and Caffeine Pairings
Take, for example…
It's 9 am on a Saturday and I'm cooking eggs.
Crab eggs with garlic and peppers, in fact. It's nice out, and light is streaming through the windows. I'm in a perfect stoner pocket of happiness, with a pleasant task to float through in the golden morning hours. One to three bong rips of a nice, indica-dominant hybrid produces a smiley sunshine high without knocking me out of my gourd. Green Cross Farms' soil-grown Blue Magoo should do the trick—I recently copped a $40 eighth of the stuff from the Kings of Canna. It's delicious, and pairs well with Roseline Coffee's Honduras Las Flores, a washed coffee that tastes like the boysenberry syrup at IHOP.
It's 3 pm on a Thursday and I still have a bunch of work to do.
My brain is starting to get kind of gummy—fed up, perhaps, with the amount of synaptic firing I've put it through in the past 72 hours. All I really want to do is chill, but if I don't send these last dozen emails, I won't be able to chill.
I need weed that will make this last set of tasks enjoyable and distract me from the drudgery without making me stupid or slow.
The answer is Jack Herer, a sativa-dominant strain named for the late proprietor of the Third Eye Shoppe that is typically below 20 percent THC, and sometimes as low as 15 percent. This bud produces a lucid, focused high with a mellow wallop. Focused, not fucked, I smoke half of a half-gram pre-roll of Serra's house brand, Pruf Cultivar, and then go to Heart Coffee Roasters on East Burnside Street. I recommend pairing that focused high with a shot of Stereo espresso and a pot of decaffeinated carrot tea from Song Tea. Drink the espresso quickly, get to work, then let the carrot tea help you land the plane.
It's 6 pm on a Friday and the night is on my mind.
I'm a firm believer in drinking a cup of coffee at this time of evening—or even better, a shot of espresso. Most espresso bars around town are closed by now, but the Stumptown shop on Southeast Belmont Street stays open until 7 pm, and with the DJ beats and crowd noise coming from Circa 33 next door.
Hair Bender espresso, please. But what's the weed pairing? I love the Quill, the gorgeous OMFGCO-designed disposable vape pen that costs about $40. I picked up a Quill pen full of Jack the Ripper C02 extract—the strain is super wakey-wakey. I don't know if I would smoke it as flower, but in a Quill microdose format (each puff is just 2 milligrams), it's perfect.
It's 10pm on a Sunday and I'm reading a book—the analog kind with pages of paper that you turn.
No more digital stuff tonight; Monday morning will mean plenty of that. I light some incense and settle in for what I hope will be about 50 pages of reading with my cat.
The weed is Yummy—literally, that is its strain name—that I picked up from MindRite, one of the friendliest little shops in town. Yummy is an indica-dominant, high-CBD strain that's all about tranquility and relaxation. But it's not necessarily going to put you to sleep. The perfect coffee to pair with this, and with my late-evening book moment, is Olympia Coffee Roasting Company's Asterisk decaf, brewed as mindfully as a pour-over.
I love decaffeinated coffee, but not all decaf is created equal. This is, after many years of tasting and searching, my absolute favorite decaf on the market right now, made from cooperative-grown Ethiopian Sidama coffee, decaffeinated in British Columbia by the experts at Swiss Water Process. The coffee's plum and spice notes hang great with that Yummy bud, which I'm smoking in a joint, of course, because I like to pretend it's the 20th century, when smoking and reading were once required activities of the literary set.
Jordan Michelman is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge, the world's most popular coffee publication, based in Portland.