What Coava Coffee Roasters is known for
Portland, Oregon specialty roaster founded 2008 by Matt Higgins and Keith Gehrke; Gehrke's reusable metal Kone filter for Chemex became one of the brand's signature products.
Coava Coffee Roasters traces back to 2008, when founder Matt Higgins began roasting coffee in his North Portland garage for wholesale customers before opening the company's first café at Main and Grand. Co-founder Keith Gehrke, a veteran barista, went on to design the Kone, a reusable metal cone filter built to replace paper filters on Chemex pour-over brewers; it debuted at Coava's brew bar in 2011 and is now sold internationally under the Able Brewing name. The company describes its sourcing approach as building long-term, sustainable partnerships with coffee producers, aiming for a buying model it says is "good for farmers" as well as for the specialty coffee industry as a whole, and it roasts to order rather than holding large finished-bean inventory. Current single-origin offerings are rotated and named individually — a recent example is La Llamarada from Nicaragua, described with tasting notes of almond, apricot, and chocolate cake. The Kone is the clearest distinguishing fact: Coava did not simply adopt pour-over brewing, one of its own co-founders engineered a specific piece of brewing hardware, still sold today, in direct response to the waste generated by paper filters.
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — Single-origin pour-over from the Portland roaster behind the reusable Kone filter.
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