It’s All In A Name

For those of our readers who paid attention, you already spotted the "soft" unveiling of the name for our planned new coffee shop on Waitsburg's Main Street.

You would have seen it in the first-ever Touchet River Valley visitors guide we released in collaboration with the Blue Mountain News earlier this month. It was in the form of a "Coming This Summer" ad in the guide's dining section.

But we'll give you the real scoop about its origin here, or at least the reasons why we chose the name.

We've brainstormed about the name for as long as we've had the idea of opening a coffee shop on Main Street, and that precedes our purchase of the two Times buildings in November 2009.

As excited as we were about taking over the Times, it was equally inspiring to know at the time that we could turn one of the buildings the newspaper owned into a gourmet espresso cafe and a place for local residents to hang out in a second living room away from home.

A name is important to a business. It's part of your identity, part of your customers' experience, part of your "presentation." It conjures up images and associations. So we wanted to be very mindful about our selection.

We had a blast thinking of different names. One possibility was a play on existing fixtures on Main Street. For patrons "whooping it up" at the Whoop Em Up (or the jimgermanbar) in the evening, for instance, we thought perhaps a morning operation like ours ought to be called the Scoop Em Up.

That led to the name the "Big Scoop" or the "Scoop," appropriate for several reasons. We'd be scooping up the "partiers" for coffee the next morning. We'd be serving homemade ice cream and scooping arabica coffee beans into our espresso grinders daily. Plus, being next to a newspaper, you'll be able to get the "scoop" in the latest edition of the Times.

That name stuck for a long time.

So did " Freedom Of Espresso." It was an original brain wave, meaning that one of us combined the First Amendment phrase (again, next door to the newspaper) with our yearning for decent coffee. But when we went online, we discovered there's a coffee shop by that same name in the college town of Ithaca, New York. Great minds think alike.

We're still going to keep it - as our tag line or slogan.

We tapped the news industry vein for a while, coming up with The Newsroom, Tutti Papparazzi, Early Edition, Type A, Hard News Cafe, Grip & Grounds, Reliable Source, Muckraker, and Periodista (Spanish for "reporter").

One choice that also stood out for a long time was the Buzz, since it combined the lift from caffeine with the excitement of all the news gathered for the newspaper.

The choices got much more far-fetched at one time. We had Espresso Desperado or Despressorado, Blistering Barnacles (a favorite exclamation of Captain Haddock of the comic series Tin Tin, which we liked simply for the way it sounded), Sticky Fingers (for some of the more gooey pastries we might serve), Crowd Control (we are hoping to be popular), Rocket Fuel, Blue Vienna, Dancing Dawn, Dizzy's (that famous local mutt), Oasis (a place where Izzy the camel could feel comfortable), Chez Matthee and so on.

All those names sounded great. Well, at least many of them. But they were lacking je ne sais qua. If you heard the name, you might imagine being anywhere in the country or any English-speaking part of the world. They may have a clever ring or double meaning, but they're not local. In the end, we wanted the name to be both intriguing and familiar to our area.

We considered the names of local features, such as street names, hollows, early pioneers, the Blue Mountains (which brings up a lot of references to coffee grown in Jamaica when you do a Google search), local Native tribes and so on.

Cafe Cayuse had a nice sound to it, but it wasn't necessarily local enough, and there's already a great wine label by that name.

Then one local name emerged that had not been tapped much by anyone: Coppei. We liked it because the water from Coppei Creek passes right through our town and a part of the valley.

It also had an exotic flavor to it, conjuring up images of the early 15th century coffee houses in Constantinople or Bohemia. The "ei" or "eye" part made me think of the physical eye at the top of the pyramid on the dollar bill. You can even abbreviate our official name, Coppei Coffee Company, and turn it into a new addition to the chemistry table: CO3.

But the name, as we discovered from some research, is very local. It's a Palouse Indian word meaning "birth place."

At one time, before Waitsburg became the predominant town at the confluence of the Touchet and Coppei Creek, there was a small settlement called Coppei, which had some promise in its day.

We're not sure why the Palouse gave the creek that name, but we found it inspiring as a name for a cradle for morning life and a place to nurture the body with good food, the mind with conversation.

In the next few weeks, a banner will go up on the Mock Building announcing the opening of Coppei Coffee Company this summer with the logo co-designed by Dayton's Josh Heim.

Once we're open, CO3 will be there as the daily birthplace of your morning coffee.