Stoked Roasters + Coffeehouse

A chalk drawing on the wall at Stoked Roasters + Coffeehouse, showing a blossom tree in bloom with the words "Live in full Bloom"To celebrate Brian’s Travel Spot reaching the West Coast and the Columbia Gorge, I present Stoked Roasters and Coffeehouse in Hood River, on the Oregon side of the amazing Columbia Gorge. That I even know about Stoked is down to Chloe, aka The Faerietale Foodie, who visited a few months before me and informed me of this wonderful find.

Stoked is indicative of the spread of speciality coffee outside of the big America cities. Both roaster and coffeehouse, a model much more common in the US than it is in the UK, Stoked roasts all its coffee in the store itself on a lovely San Franciscan roaster. You can buy all the output, a mixture of single-origins and blends, from a retail shelf by the door. As is often the case in the US, the beans, even for the single-origins, are typically roasted more darkly than in the UK.

When it comes to the coffeehouse side of the business, Stoked offers a wide range of drinks, including house-blend, single-origin and decaf on espresso, the obligatory bulk brew and hand-poured filter on the V60. While I was there, there was a choice between three single-origins and, unusually for filter, two blends.

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Brian’s Travel Spot: The Pacific Northwest

The amazing Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge. There are two parts to the falls, the larger one dropping into a pool before passing under a bridge and over the second, smaller falls.Welcome to the third and final instalment of Brian’s Travel Spot, following my three week adventure across the United States. The first instalment, imaginatively entitled New England, covered my time on the east coast in New England: Boston, Providence and Portland, Maine, to be precise. The second instalment, Heading West, covered my journey west, by train, from Portland in Maine, to Portland in Oregon, a total of just over three days on the train, although I had a couple of stop-offs along the way. This, the final instalment, covers my week in the Pacific Northwest and my flight home.

I wrote Brian’s Travel Spot to enable you to follow my adventures as they unfolded. Unfortunately, as the trip went along, the Travel Spot got further and further behind, so now you’ll be reliving my adventures. As with the first two posts, I’ll update this post every few days, in between my normal Coffee Spot posts, the idea being to capture the highlights, with the emphasis on the travel rather than the coffees shops (although they feature too).

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