Using grain filler on oak prevents the high contrast effect of a dark stain in the pores. It also makes it overall less stainable. I used pore filler on my oak kit. cabs. You can tint pore filler as well for the ultimate enhanced oak grain with a totally filled-in gloss finish.

What's wrong with using walnut? Or another wood that gives you the color you want? I don't get the urge to fiddle with staining, with all of its vagaries, rather than just build using the color you want in the first place. If you want lime green, then sure, you have to deal with stain, but walnut (black, english, clara) should make up into a perfectly nice, beautiful butcher block (black walnut will get lighter with exposure to sunlight). There is much to be said for using what nature gives us.

If you want easy to stain countertops, alder is probably the best. Beech is fairly easy, oak (despite the grain) not too hard, and birch is a PITA because it's so impervious to stains.

rweigand ... we can't all afford walnut, Some of us have to fake it.

I can certainly understand the desire to save money, but I'm not sure this is a great place to do it. If $$ are paramount there are excellent laminate counters that are hard to beat, we've used them several places in our house for exactly that reason. The cost difference between lumber species is trivial on the scale of most GW kitchen remodels, however.

If you need 20 ft of counter, for example, the material cost for beech would be about $712 (figure 150 bf plus a 10% overage for waste at $5.40/bf). Walnut here would run $10.40/bf, have probably twice the waste and so would cost ~$1827, a difference of about $1100. Not chump change in my household, but a relatively small portion of the US average kitchen remodel cost last year of $57K, and still probably half the cost of granite. Cost for glue and such to make up the tops will be the same no matter the species.

The huge difference come in when it comes time to resurface. My butcher block island, like any that gets used, gets stained from foods, iron pots and other mishaps, rough from water exposure, and occasional cuts (when I'm not looking) such that I need to scrape or re-plane the surface about every five years. If it were stained that would turn into a major hassle, having either to plane down to a completely clean surface or trying to fussy patch stain to make it uniform once more. With an unstained wood surface I can just re-oil and we're good to go.

I'll just add that staining a working surface, such as a butcher block counter-top is a bad idea. And will turn the already higher maintenance demands of the butcher block counter into an even higher maintenance item. And will likely look pretty bad after a short while.

Or, what rwiegand said.