Vancouver, Whistler & Vancouver Island - Washington, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest - page 872

and outdoor seating, and little pressure to buy more food and drink even after camping
out at a table for hours. But the desire to caffeinate extends beyond the cafe; you'll be
able to find drive-through coffee shacks in rural areas and on remote roads.
Locals take coffee just as seriously as beer, and for the most part, they prefer dark
roasts. But ultimately the quality of the beans and the roast determines a coffee's pop-
ularity. As with most food and drink in these parts, consumers demand details about what
they're consuming - the wheres, hows and whys of harvests and roastings.
That attention to detail has led to extensive coffee-sourcing programs at Northwest
roasteries, and many coffee roasters personally travel around the globe to source beans.
Only in this way can they describe how coffee farmers in Guatemala treat their workers
and coffee trees. At the most high-level coffee cafes, experienced baristas will happily
banter about the origins of any roast and will share their thoughts about bean grinds and
more. Try a trendy 'pour-over' coffee if you get the chance.
Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which started in Portland with one roastery and cafe in
1999, helped small-batch roasting go mainstream (the company now has locations in
Seattle, New York City and Los Angeles). These days, 'micro roasters,' who roast blends
and single-origin coffees to precise specifications in garages, metal shops and basements,
create some of the best coffee beans in the world. Many Northwest cafes now feature
beans from multiple micro roasters, or they roast their own batches on site.
Left Coast Roast: A Guide to the Best Coffee and Roasters from San Francisco to
Seattle, by Hanna Neuschwander, deconstructs the roasting process and reveals where
to get some of the best coffee on this coast.
Wine
Many Northwesterners can remember a time when 'local wine' meant a varietal from
northern California. That's because winegrowing in the Pacific Northwest is a relatively
new phenomenon: most vines were planted in the past couple of decades. Recent suc-
cesses have spurred a boom in grape planting and wine production.
For the visitor, the burgeoning wine industry can mean an odd mixture of hole-in-the-
wall tasting rooms and sprawling new hotels with wine-themed spa treatments, and it's
easy to find people who will tout the non-Napa nature of the local wine regions or remin-
isce about the simpler times of days gone by.
Oregon's modern wine movement began in the 1960s, most notably when a handful of
Californians made their way north to Oregon's Willamette Valley and planted pinot noir
grapes, a delicate and difficult-to-grow variety. Oregon's hot, dry summers, cool, wet