Scoop: Gossip Driving Cadillacs In Its Dreams.

By WW Culture Staff
  1. COLD FUSION: Stumptown’s cold-brewed coffee is now available on a nitro tap—the kind used to pour a proper pint of Guinness—at the Southwest 3rd Avenue location. This newfangled caffeine-delivery method produces a sweet cuppa that’s smoothly effervescent with a frothy head. It looks like beer and tastes like, well, cold-brewed coffee. This is part of a renewed emphasis on cold brew from Stumptown. In addition to its ubiquitous stubbies, Stumptown will also be starting a single-source cold-brew coffee program and serving up seasonal cold-brewed concoctions from growlers, which during winter is basically a coffee version of chai.
  1. AVIGNON BEARD: The World Beard and Moustache Championships are set for Portland in September 2014. But lo, the World Beard and Moustache Association in Germany, which helps coordinate worldwide beard events, says the Portland competition is unsanctioned. Phil Olsen, owner of Beard Team USA, is staging the Portland competition. He took out a U.S. trademark on the name “World Beard and Moustache Championships” in 2011 and wrote a cease-and-desist letter to stop the 2017 WBMA championships in Austin, Texas. According to beard-growing competitor Brian Snoderly, some beard growers will boycott the Portland competition. Check wweek.com for details.
  1. S-K AT PJ: Sleater-Kinney (briefly) reunited at Pearl Jam’s Nov. 29 show at the Moda Center. All three members of the band—Corin Tucker, Carrie “Portlandia” Brownstein and Janet Weiss—joined Eddie Vedder and company onstage for the final song of Pearl Jam’s set, a seven-minute cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” that’s long been a staple of the band’s set. Brownstein did her patented mini-windmill, Weiss played drums, and Tucker sang a verse before taking up the tambourine.
  1. BARACK’S BOOKS: Portlander Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild may pop up on a very famous nightstand sometime soon: Barack Obama’s. The president stopped by an independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., for Small Business Saturday—a thumbing of the nose to Black Friday—and left with a heavy shopping bag. Among the books he bought, according to the Los Angeles Times, were Strayed’s memoir about hiking part of the Pacific Crest Trail, as well as works by Willa Cather, E.L. Doctorow, Carson McCullers and Khaled Hosseini.

WWeek 2015

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