Written by Jordan Michelman.
The proliferation of mobile coffee carts over the last decade is impossible to ignore, as advances in tech and accessibility have given aspiring specialty coffee entrepreneurs seemingly limitless new avenues in which to vibe out on offering a high-end coffee experience. Coffee for events, coffee for offices, coffee in every nook and cranny of American public life: if there are people around, someone likely needs an espresso.
Colin Lassiter’s Howdy Coffee is a Portland, Oregon, version of a story with resonance all across the country. A barista by trade with dreams of someday owning his own business, Colin invested in just enough gear he needed to get started back in 2020, then rode out the pandemic patiently waiting for events to return. Now here in 2025, he’s got three carts, a staff of four, and a busy event schedule working private events, offices, and parties across Oregon and Washington. Along the way he’s been able to depend on a unique mobile espresso machine set-up, using both a La Marzocco GS3 and a La Marzocco Home Linea Mini together in multi-cart harmony.
Amidst a busy summer 2025 events season, I spoke with Colin Lassiter to learn more about Howdy Coffee.
Hey Colin, thanks so much for speaking with us! I would love to start by asking you to tell us a little more about Howdy Coffee—how do you describe your work to someone who might be unfamiliar?
Absolutely. So we are a specialty coffee catering company. We source our products from companies that are local to Portland, including coffee from Proud Mary, matcha from The Matcha Freak, and chai from Soul Chai. We bring the goods to private events all around Oregon and Washington.
Howdy was first launched in January of 2020, and the first year of business for us was basically non-existent. I was still working full-time in cafes when we launched the brand, and I had obviously hoped to make it more like a side hustle to start. Then the pandemic hit, and it wiped out my job as well as any opportunity for private events, and I was just kind of sitting there like, brainstorming, doing design work, logo work, just to try and get ready for when all this stuff blew over, really, and be able to hit the ground running.
We booked our first official event in July of 2022, just over three years ago—and now we have scaled from just a little cart I bought off of Facebook Marketplace to three great carts. I do roughly fifteen to twenty events per month, and the majority of the events I do are actually at corporate offices and small businesses around the region, who are looking for a nice gesture to offer their teams. Bringing in top-tier specialty coffee to an office setting and treating employees to something special is something everyone loves.
That’s so cool—and it means you don’t have to necessarily do individual transactions at your events, right?
Yes, that’s right, which means we really just get to focus on the coffee and the guests.
Tell me more about your carts and the journey you’ve been on there.
So our first cart was just this big clunker of an espresso cart. I found it on Facebook, and that’s what got me started. Since then, I’ve tried to make things a little more mobile. I experimented with building my own carts, but it turns out I’m not so handy at building structures. Now I’ve gone all in on a company called Simple Cart Systems, which is based in South Dakota. They’re really fantastic and manufacture a lot of their own systems.
What’s the coffee-making set-up like on your carts?
My baby is the La Marzocco GS3. It’s a gorgeous machine that crushes the rush no matter what, and holds up to the most demanding shifts. This is my primary machine, but I also have a Linea Mini that works as a sort of back-up machine, or extra machine at events where we’ve got two carts running. The Linea Mini I own was my very first machine, from the early days of Howdy when we were balling on a budget. I purchased a well-maintained early Linea Mini that came out in 2016, which was only the second full year of La Marzocco Home. In all that time, the machine has only needed one part replacement, and that was a huge selling point for me when I started my business and decided to go with La Marzocco machines.
We also use Mahlkonig E65 Grind By Weight grinders on the cart, as well as a Puq Press to take care of our wrists.
How do you approach dividing labor between the two machines, the GS3 and the Linea Mini?
Whatever the larger event is, we’ll take the GS3, and then for smaller events, we’ll bring the Linea Mini. But pretty often, I’ll end up taking two carts to a single event, and so then we’ve got a GS3 on one and a Linea Mini on the other, and the staff gets to fight over who uses which machine.
How many staff do you have right now?
I’m currently working with four staffers. It’s really been a wild ride; I decided to go in on expansion in November 2024, and our summer this year has been so busy.
With all the different sorts of events you get to do, is there a favorite one that stands out?
I have a few! We do a lot of regular client work from larger companies, including a partnership with the Doc Martens US headquarters in downtown Portland, and they’re always great to work with. But I would say a really memorable one was an event I did pretty recently in partnership with the Portland Thorns, Portland’s excellent NSWL team, and that was really fun. And I’ve also done the Travel Portland Awards, which was a more recent one, and that was very fun to work with Travel Portland on that. Working with all these high-profile clients around the city has been so nice, and it just makes me feel like I’m actually doing something slightly impactful with my business.
Visit Howdy Coffee at their website and on Instagram.
