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SuperJoy Coffee Lab/Roasters
1401 SW Yamhill St., 971-271-7185, superjoy.coffee. 7 am-2 pm Monday-Friday, 8 am-2 pm Saturday-Sunday.
How do you convert the bean water-indifferent into a coffee connoisseur? Offer that person a sip of a highly sought-after Gesha variety. “The complexity of that coffee was mind-blowing,” SuperJoy owner Christopher Ou says. “It was delicately sweet. I was perplexed at first, unsure if I was sipping floral tea or coffee.” That sample of Colombian Gesha beans—a cultivar that originated in Ethiopia’s Gori Gesha forest but is now grown in a variety of countries that trade in beans—sparked Ou’s interest in coffee. Eight years after that experience, his two downtown SuperJoy locations are known for their simple yet high-quality drip and pour-overs (you can also find a few specialty drinks like maple oat pumpkin rose honey latte and Szechuan peppercorn mocha), and Ou roasts the beans for all of the offerings himself.
While most of that process happens behind the scenes at an off-site facility, the cafe along the MAX tracks on Yamhill houses a 500-gram-batch-capacity Mill City Roasters machine. Currently, Ou uses it for baby batches: submissions to coffee competitions, those made with limited-availability beans, and small online orders. He hopes to put the roaster to use as an educational tool for customers seeking a hands-on understanding of the chemical changes beans undergo to become brown and aromatic. For now, keep an eye out for other events like cuppings, which Ou has slowly rolled out as we emerge from the pandemic. And even if you have no interest in high-falutin tasting rituals or the chemistry of roasting, SuperJoy is also a great place to get a solid brew—the barista’s recommendation on my visit was a piccolo, a silky drink with espresso made from Guatemalan beans that lent it notes of dark chocolate as well as a bright, balancing Ethiopian variety.