Coava Coffee Roasters

Coava began in 2008 when Matt Higgins started roasting coffee out of his garage in North Portland, building relationships directly with coffee farms rather than buying through brokers. The business grew into a direct trade roaster built around single origin lots, and in 2010 it opened the flagship cafe on Southeast Grand Avenue that still anchors the company today, a long industrial space with a wooden bar and exposed rafters a few blocks from the roastery.

Higgins was named Oregon's small business person of the year in 2018, and the Grand Avenue cafe has drawn national attention, including a stop on Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The space fills with laptops through the morning on free wifi, with a couple of sidewalk tables for dogs waiting on a to go order, and Coava now runs two more Portland cafes, an espresso bar on Hawthorne Boulevard and a cafe inside its Southeast Main Street roastery, along with a location in San Diego.