Scoop: Fair Trade, Single Origin Gossip.

1. PORE OVER THE PLAN: Because making pour-over coffee is a pain, someone in Portland is handcrafting $480 coffeemakers that basically automate the Chemex. Clive Coffee founder Mark Hellweg claims his new brewing device, Ratio, can make 40 ounces of pour-over-style coffee in six minutes or less. On a password-protected website, he claims Ratio will be able to automate and simplify pour-over brewing, boiling it down to one press of a button. “I’ve run a [coffee-equipment] company for six years, I know what frustrates people.” he says. “If you do [pour-over] badly, it really sucks.” The only headache left? Weighing and grinding the beans. Presumably, a future machine will open the bag, weigh and grind the beans for you, then transfer the coffee into this machine by vacuum tube. The Ratio’s targeted release is April 2014.

1. KINGDOM COME AND GO: Eric Bechard’s 6-month-old restaurant, Kingdom of Roosevelt, will be moving from Southeast Cesar Chavez Boulevard to an undisclosed location. The restaurant, which focuses on wild game and locally foraged ingredients, veers far from the Portland wheelhouse of midpriced comfort fare, and has been half-empty on recent visits by WW. “We’re not commenting on it, but we are moving,” Bechard said by phone. The deal is still pending. But if it goes through, the space will be taken over by Gina Helvie, a friend of Bechard’s who works at the restaurant, along with Robert Thomas of Swift Lounge and Andrew Hanson. Helvie says the planned brunch place, called Trinket, will be “more accessible than what’s happening now—something cool for people in the neighborhood.”

1. MAXED OUT: OMSI’S OMNIMAX will soon become a “mainstream” movie theater with a digital projector and smaller screen. The museum has confirmed the iconic theater will be converted into something resembling a regular movie theater—mostly by ditching the huge screen. They’ll still show movies like Dolphins (narrated by Pierce Brosnan), Dinosaurs Alive (narrated by Michael Douglas) and Hubble (narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio) for school groups, but they also plan to show “mainstream content” during the museum’s off hours. The last event at the theater before the switch will be TechfestNW (narrated by Mark Zusman), this paper’s second annual convention of up-and-coming technology, which starts Friday, Sept. 6.

1. OPEN WIEDEN: Katherine Wieden, daughter of advertising magnate Dan Wieden and known to most as Cassie, will be releasing her own wine. According to Northwest Portland’s Boedecker Cellars, Wieden’s Finnigan Hill Vineyards enlisted Boedecker to make a 2012 mark of pinot noir from the vineyard’s grapes. The wine will eventually be for sale, but no release date has been set. 

WWeek 2015