Mt. Hood Roasters

Mt. Hood Roasters… is a family owned and operated business in Rhododendron, Oregon, in the shadow of the majestic Mt Hood. The founders, Rick & Jiyeon Applegate, started Mt Hood Roasters in 2002 when Rick retired from the Army after 21 years of military service. The Applegate name in Oregon dates back to the 1840’s when the Applegate’s brought families and livestock to the Oregon Territory, built the famed Applegate Trail (Oregon’s southern route) to the Oregon Territory, farmed, surveyed, built businesses and helped establish the regions earliest forms of government. The pioneer Jesse Applegate is known as one of Oregon’s earliest statesmen. While Rick is not a direct decedent of the three Applegate families that first came to Oregon, he is a blood relative (cousin) and spent his life celebrating the Applegate family’s adventuring, wanderlust lives marked by their arrival in the US in the 1600’s, helping settle the Kentucky/Missouri area along with the famed Daniel Boone family in the late 1700’s, and then pioneered their way to the Oregon Territory in 1843. Rick’s Great-Aunt & Uncle, Delia Applegate-Anderson and Andy Anderson were also credited with naming the nation’s oldest search and rescue organization, The Crag Rat’s, that hail from Hood River where their home they built in the 1920’s is on the National Historic Register. Rick & Jiyeon Applegate It is no wonder why Rick & Jiyeon celebrate everything Oregon through their business nestled on the slopes of Oregon’s most iconic mountain, Mt Hood. National Geographic Society recognized the GeoTourism value of their operation by publishing this business in the National Geographic MapGuide to the Oregon and Washington Cascades map. As this map points out, a trip to Mt Hood Roasters takes the visitor far beyond any expectation one might expect while visiting an Oregon micro-roastery. The modest roasting facility is nestled between the Hunchback and Zig Zag slopes of Mt. Hood along the other famed Oregon pioneer cutoff trail, The Barlow Trail. Inside the roastery one finds that the roasting machinery was invented by one of the most important names, historically, in the coffee roasting fluid bed air roasting process, Michael Sivetz. Mt Hood Roasters is where history, the Applegate family, geography, Oregon’s culinary genius…everything great about Oregon meets.