When I’m traveling, my drink of choice is an iced, triple-tall, hazelnut, nonfat latte from Starbucks. For those that don’t speak Starbuckanese, that’s three shots of espresso with a little hazelnut syrup and nonfat milk over ice.
My record is 13 shots of espresso in one realllllllly long day. I hope to never challenge that record again.
So it was with much reluctance that I was assigned a story on one of my biggest vices in the world: coffee.
I was shooting for the next issue of Images of Cowlitz County magazine in Longview, WA, and one of the main stories was on the plethora of coffee shops in town. They have your regular coffee shops like Guse’s which has been roasting their own coffee for over two decades. There are coffee shops in little log cabins on the side of the road. There is even a coffee shop in a caboose. It’s called the “Espresso Express.” Go figure.
There seems like there is almost a coffee shop around every corner.
Ken Guse started his brewery after retiring from the local Weyerhaeuser plant over twenty years ago. It’s literally the center of town. Everyone who is anyone stops in for a cup of Joe. On the wall, above a long table that looks like it came from City Hall’s boardroom, is a reproduction of a mural of the town’s founding fathers. Except the faces have been replaced with those that frequent the coffee shop for the daily 9am meet-up of regulars. A fitting tribute to those that have and still do direct the goings on in Longview.
Guse no longer runs the coffee shop. His daughter Georgia has taken over the reins. She still roasts coffee in the roaster her father built almost 25 years ago. The regulars still come in every morning, their personalized coffee mugs hang from a rack on the wall. And they still run the town over a couple cups of coffee from that de facto boardroom at Guse’s.
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