Starbucks: Coffee chain adds beer, wine at Portland store

PORTLAND, Ore. - If you pop into the brand new Starbucks in Portland’s Brewery Blocks, you’ll find the usual lineup of coffee drinks. But unlike any other Starbucks in Oregon, you’ll also find beer and wine.

The Starbucks at NW Couch Street and 11th Avenue is the company’s first location outside of Seattle that sells all three “crown jewels” of the Northwest beverage scene: Coffee, beer and wine.

Starbucks opened its first beer and wine location in Seattle in October.

The Portland shop is notable not just for the alcohol, but also for its environmental credentials. The shop is certified as a LEED Silver environmentally-friendly store.

One of the counters customers was made from a tree that fell in Oregon City. Leather on the front of the cash register counter was reclaimed from auto scrap yards.

The first customer in the store Monday morning was a Starbucks fanatic named Winter (yes, that’s his full name). Winter has visited more than 10,700 Starbucks stores around the world and writes about them on his website, starbuckseverywhere.net.

“I’ll get a kick out of writing about the beer and the wine as well as the coffee, and writing about its unique décor and the fact that it uses repurposed materials and that’s it’s in a cool part of Portland,” he said.

The new location opens early for people needing their coffee fix in the morning, but the beer and wine doesn’t start flowing until 2 p.m. on weekdays or noon on weekends. Several of the beer and wine selections come from the Pacific Northwest.

KATU reporter Melanie Wingo and KATU.com producer John Tierney contributed to this report