How the Pacific Northwest Became the Land of Roadside Espresso Stands

Every year for the past decade, Washington State has gained between 38,000 and 98,000 transplants — migrants who come here for the natural beauty or the tech jobs or for no reason at all. And, every so often, one of these newcomers notices the drive-thru espresso stands dotting the highways and tucked inside parking lots.

“I visited the area in the summer and I was wondering what those small coffee shops that take up a parking spot or two are,” a Redditor asked two years ago. In 2021, a pastor-slash-blogger examined the “espresso shacks of Washington State” with similar curiosity: “They look temporary, in most cases (though I don’t think they are). They’re often positioned in a little corner of a big parking lot or right next to a gas station. They’re tiny. Maybe an average of 100 square feet. But they seem to be very popular.”

Lizzie Likness, a former preteen cooking entrepreneur from Georgia, was so drawn to these espresso stands that she started documenting them on an Instagram account in the summer of 2020. “We didn’t really have those in the South, so I had no idea what they were,” she says. “They just have this fun old-school vibe. Usually, the people who work there are really friendly and in the shops themselves are just really charming.” She’s seen stands with 14-foot-tall Bigfoot statues, stands shaped like lighthouses and windmills, stands that almost eschew “coffee” entirely in favor of blended, psychedelic-hued Red Bull drinks.

Even Likness doesn’t know where these stands came from. They seem to have just sort of always been part of the Pacific Northwest landscape, serving coffee and energy drink-based concoctions to road-tripping parents, truckers, night-shift workers, and anyone else needing a quick pick-me-up. Espresso stands rarely have websites or strong social media footprints. (Plenty of them don’t even have plumbing setups). If you grew up in the region during the past 30 years, you might not even notice them, the way you sort of stop seeing the mountains after a while. It takes an outsider’s perspective to realize how special, and how strange, espresso stands really are.

The first drive-thru coffee shop in the U.S. is generally recognized as being Portland’s Motor Moka, which opened in 1990. That business later failed, but the appeal of getting a little coffee treat without leaving your car endured. In the Pacific Northwest, where the damp climate makes hot drinks a necessity for more than half the year, it’s no surprise that espresso stands took off.

“It’s coffee culture, mixed with car culture, mixed with the weather, mixed with convenience,” says Brad Holden, a historian who has written about coffee. But espresso stands don’t exactly cater to coffee connoisseurs; You won’t find AeroPresses or pour-over options here. They serve people who need caffeine right now. Traditionally, espresso stands have a wide variety of flavored syrups (usually Torani brand). Stands will often advertise drinks that taste like Snickers, or Cinnamon Toast Crunch, or s’mores, all created through the magic of mixing syrup pumps.

They’ll also typically offer something called “white coffee,” which you won’t find in many coffee shops, maybe for good reason. White coffee is made from beans that are roasted very lightly and thus retain more of their caffeine and are less acidic than normal beans. “We roast it to a point where it’s just starting to give up some of its water,” says Scott Simmons of Ootopia Coffee Roasters in Bremerton, Washington, which supplies white coffee to more than 60 stands from Forks to Tacoma. The beans are still so hard that they’ll damage normal blade or burr grinders, so Ootopia grinds them on site with an industrial-grade machine. Simmons hates being in the room when the grinder is running. “It smells like you’re in a barn, if you know what I’m saying, on a warm summer day,” he says. “Personally, I don’t like white coffee.” If you order a “black” white Americano at a stand, what you’ll get will look and taste like a cup of dirty water.

You can also just skip the coffee entirely. Espresso stands often serve energy drinks (Red Bull or Lotus brands, normally) with flavored syrups, sometimes topped with whipped cream — a genre of drink really intended for health care workers on long shifts or students cramming for finals week. These drinks are big, cold, sweet, and sharp; they taste like a doctor telling you to stop drinking them. And espresso stand customers love them.

“We sell more of those than I think we do coffee,” says Katie Briola, who has worked at the Muddy Waters stand in Seattle for two decades. “We were joking about how we became a Red Bull stand and not a coffee stand anymore.”

Briola started working at espresso stands for the freedom it gave her; many of these places are staffed by a single barista, with no manager looking over their shoulder or telling them what music to play. But what she came to value about her job was the relationships she built with her customers. “You just get to meet so many different kinds of people,” she says. “You have struggling single moms trying to do two, three jobs at a time and need that extra caffeine and a treat for themselves up to people who work for financial institutions or Bill Gates.”

Working at an espresso stand alone isn’t always easy. “Last September I was robbed at gunpoint,” Briola says, the third time in two years the stand has been robbed. And some customers can say “stupid shit,” like sexual come-ons or comments about what she’s wearing. “You kind of have a thick skin and shut it down.”

But Muddy Waters’s customers rallied around Briola when she lost her first husband two years ago. When she remarried, one of her regulars officiated the wedding in their backyard. “It’s going to make me cry how much they’ve done for me.”

Espresso stands can be attractive businesses to own. The leases are more affordable than full-scale coffee shops, stands require very few employees, and the main ingredients in drinks are all shelf-stable, so even if you aren’t getting many customers driving through or walking up, you won’t be losing too much money on any given day. “This business model is able to at least stay afloat with really low sales,” says Mark Larkin, whose family has owned Tacoma’s Wolfe Club stand since 2008, when it was called Brew It 4 U. As a teenager working at the stand alone, Larkin remembers turning on Harry Potter films during slow periods.

Back then, Larkin says that it was unusual to see a man who worked at one of these stands — in some cases, customers would decide not to get any drinks from him because he was a guy.

Briola agrees that for whatever reason, it’s more common to see women working these businesses. “I honestly think people get on guard when a guy is working,” she says. “People don’t warm up to them.” She’s hired men only to have them quit on her. “It doesn’t work out for them,” she says, maybe because they can’t handle the isolation of working solo in a tiny space, maybe because they can’t deal with the stress of making drinks while simultaneously taking orders and keeping the area somewhat clean. “It can be very overwhelming for people who don’t know how to multitask.”

By the late ’90s, there were likely hundreds of espresso stands across the Pacific Northwest serving more or less the same drinks, often staffed by young women, all competing with one another. Some turned to sex appeal as a way to stand out, and “bikini espresso” was born — a misnomer, since the baristas typically wear lingerie or other revealing outfits, not swimsuits.

The first one in Washington State, Holden says, was Natte Latte in Port Orchard, which opened in 1999 and had the baristas in hot pink pants, a la Hooters. By 2007, the trend had become so ubiquitous that the Seattle Times reported on it, writing, “To stand apart from the hordes of drive-through espresso stands that clutter the Northwest’s roadsides, commuter coffee stops … are adding bodacious baristas, flirty service and ever more-revealing outfits to the menu.”

In some cases, bikini espresso stands have been fronts for illegal sex work operations or have exploited minors. Even the stands that don’t make headlines for nefarious reasons aren’t necessarily the best employers. Caprice Gauthier, the owner of Portland’s Girls Next Door Espresso, told Eater Portland that male-owned bikini espresso stands often had a “‘you have to come hang out in my hot tub to pick up your paycheck’ vibe.” Gauthier is one of many baristas-turned-owners in Portland who are pushing for a new era of professionalism in the industry, where worker safety is prioritized and harassment — from customers or bosses — isn’t tolerated.

The espresso stand industry is evolving from its ramshackle, sometimes skeezy, roots. You’ll see more male baristas, for one thing. (Though not at “sexpresso” stands — Seattle’s famous shirtless barista shop, DreamGuyz, quietly closed years ago.) It’s also become slightly more corporate, with chains like Bigfoot Java and Gravity Coffee spreading across the region. Larkin’s Wolfe Club is trying to compete with those chains by making as much as possible from scratch — a rarity in an industry where everyone uses the same ingredients. Wolfe Club roasts its own beans and makes its own syrups, even its own “energy drink,” which is a blend of green tea, citrus, honey, and sugar.

Maybe the next wave of espresso stands will follow Wolfe Club’s lead and abandon those convenient, shelf-stable Torani bottles and begin to compete with one another based on how their drinks taste. Or maybe they’ll lean into social media; those toxic-colored energy drink concoctions do look pretty good on Instagram. Either way, they have to compete with each other and with Starbucks, who in recent years has massively expanded its drive-thru operation all over the country. Gone are the days when a drive-thru latte was a Pacific Northwest novelty.

But there’s still a place for these petite, idiosyncratic stands. You pull into one of them, maybe because it catches your eye from the road. It’s flashy and colorful or shaped like a log cabin. It probably has a ridiculous name like Joltin’ Jeff’s Java. You get a blended Red Bull drink or a latte blasted with flavored syrup because your body, sleep-deprived or aching from working a double, craves the sugar. But you come back day after day, not because it serves the best coffee around (it probably doesn’t) but because you like rolling up and seeing the same barista, the one who asks about your day and seems to mean it, the one who remembers your order and gives your toddler sitting in the back seat a sticker. Then you know their name, and you know theirs, and soon that stand no longer seems like an anonymous piece of sprawl. It’s a beacon, a marker, a place to stop and rest for just a few minutes on your way to wherever you are heading next.

Additional photo illustration credits: Wolfe Club and Getty Images.