North Current is a small, two-roaster operation on Washington Avenue in Portland, Maine. We buy green coffee once a season, roast five mornings a week on a 1964 Probat UG-15, and sell whatever's on the rack at our café the same afternoon. If you want to know where your beans are from, look at the chalkboard behind the bar — the farmer's name is up there.
We rotate six single-origin lots plus one house blend. Bags are roasted within four days of shipping, labeled with the farmer's name and the exact roast date.
Honey-process Caturra from Yadira Silva's two-hectare farm outside Pitalito. Lifts beautifully as pour-over; stands its ground as espresso.
Classic Yirgacheffe natural. We buy one lot a year from the Idido station — it's always the first bag on the rack in January.
Washed Bourbon from the Aguirre family's estate. Our staff espresso most mornings and the backbone of our winter blend.
Classic Nyeri acidity — bright, structured, long in the cup. Pulls well as a 1:2.5 espresso with a 30-second shot.
Our everyday espresso: 60% El Injerto, 40% rotating African component. Drinks beautifully as drip and with milk.
Ethyl-acetate decaffeinated in the cup region — one of the better decafs we've ever tasted. Honest, roasted, no cardboard.
North Current opened in the spring of 2014 in a 720-square-foot storefront a block off Washington Avenue. My brother and I had just come back from two years of coffee school in Puerto Rico and Guatemala, and we wanted a place where every pound we sold had passed through our own hands at least three times — picking out defects on the sorting table, pulling the sample roast, tasting the production batch.
Twelve years later we are still a two-roaster shop, still on the same block, still buying green coffee once a season in person. The Probat UG-15 we installed in 2014 came from a closed roastery in Providence, built in 1964, and it still runs the same four production curves it has since the week we lit it. We serve the café from the bar in front of it. The whole operation, from dock to pour-over, sits inside 1,200 square feet of what used to be a bait-and-tackle warehouse.
We work with twenty-four farms across nine countries. Every partner is someone we've visited, drunk coffee with on their porch, bought lunch from on the farm. Our relationships are long: our oldest farm partner, Finca El Injerto in Guatemala, has been on our shelf every February since 2015. That's the thing specialty coffee gets right when it gets anything right at all — the long handshake.
The shortest route from a coffee cherry on a Colombian hillside to the cup in your hand is longer than it looks. Here is what happens at every stage once the beans are ours.
We visit every farm we buy from at least once every two seasons. Nothing hits the roaster that we haven't tasted on the producer's table.
Every arriving lot gets a sample roast and a formal cupping by the two of us before we commit to the full production curve.
6.5 kg batches on the Probat UG-15. Each coffee gets its own curve, logged by hand in the same ledger since 2014.
Bags go out within 96 hours of roasting. The café bar pulls shots of this morning's roast all day long.
These are the kind of things we hear from the people who come back every morning before heading to the fishing pier.
"I drove 90 minutes from Rockland for the Yirgacheffe one summer and ended up buying a case for my brother's wedding. Three years later, we still get a bag in the mail every two weeks. The pour-over at the bar is a small religion."
"We opened a small café in Brunswick in 2023 and North Current was the only wholesale partner that returned our call the same day. They came up to help us dial in our espresso the week before we opened. Two years later, their beans are still the only thing on our hopper."
"My wife and I moved to Portland in winter 2024 and North Current was the first place we loved. The Guatemalan at the bar, a Zu Bakery almond croissant, and watching Monika weigh out the La Marzocco baskets. That's the Portland we were hoping for."
"The beginner coffee class my kids and I took last February was the best five hours we spent all winter. Jacob walked us through grind, extraction and the Chemex technique like it was the most interesting thing in the world. Now my ten-year-old grinds my morning beans."
The café runs 6:30 to 6:00 Monday through Friday and 7:30 to 5:00 on weekends. The pour-over bar is always on, the cold brew tap too. Street parking is easier after 9am.
184 Washington Ave · Portland, ME 04101