A Clean, Well-lighted Place…With Coffee To Go (Or Stay!)

Rather rapidly, Jacksonville has evolved into the tasting room center of Applegate Wine Country. We like that. The tasting rooms (some well-established at several years old, some newly aspired or yet to open), that vine throughout our business district number tentatively between six and infinity. Within their cheerful halls, they pour imaginative vintages from the Applegate, Umpqua, Rogue and Willamette valleys and beyond.

But two of the town’s very best tasting rooms aren’t included in their numbers. Wine tasting, as relaxing and appetite-enhancing as it may be, is but a gentle Diversion. There’s another elixir – powerfully potent, eminently tasty, and yes, perhaps even more demanding – that bears the title of Necessity. Every morning it’s gloriously brewed at two tasting rooms that bookend the town: our very own “The Good Bean” and “Pony Espresso.”

The beverage before which we genuflect here, obviously, is – coffee. Ahhh, coffee. The name lilts lightly over the lips. Coffee. Say it loud and there’s music playing; say it soft and it’s almost like… Okay, our apologies to Sondheim and Bernstein, but that’s how we feel. And, apparently we’re not alone. On any given morning, scores of Jacksonville’s residents, business leaders, and city officials drink in the beverage and the atmosphere while engaging in lively conversations at the Bean and the Espresso. Community, camaraderie and political transparency, all stirred together over a truly delicious morning cup o’ joe.

A key word in that last sentence is “morning.” It’s as a morning beverage that coffee differs from wine. Where wine is soothing, coffee is anything but. Humanity has known the difference for a long time. Seventh century Ethiopian sheep herders noticed that their flocks grew happier when eating berries off a local shrub. They soon found that they, too, could get the same buzz, and by the 10th century, farmers were planting coffee trees all across the Arabian peninsula. Captain John Smith, founder of the Virginia village of Jamestown carried coffee beans to this continent in 1607, but it wasn’t until 1723 that beans were planted in the New World, on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Jacksonville’s The Good Bean followed in l990; the Pony Espresso in l998. Did anything of significance happen in between? We think not. The sum of history in a coffee cup. We wouldn’t be writing – and you shouldn’t be reading – this column without it.

Speaking of history, in l965, Buck Owens sang, “Pour me another cup of coffee, for it is the best in this land…,” and we agree. A few years later, Randy Travis followed with, “I need friends who…buy their coffee beans already ground.” Not to disparage Randy or his friends, but he was praising canned, dry, aroma-less coffee grounds; you know, the kind sold by companies with slogans that claim to be “good to the last drop.” “Icky,” we say. Better to ask our exalted local baristas to grind beans for you, knowing they still are beans moments before you buy.

Coffee comes with a caveat, of course. That flavorful lift we welcome in the morning dwindles as daybreak fades inexorably to twilight. Which makes evening the perfect time to visit those other tasting rooms. You know, the ones serving that other, more soothing, beverage. Fortunately, there’s more of them in Jacksonville than you can shake a stir stick at.

Paula and Terry Each have long impressive-sounding resumes implying that they are battle-scarred veterans of life within the Hollywood studios. They’re now happily relaxed into Jacksonville.