Blue Bottle

OUR ARTICLE

Knowing what you’re about to hold, your fingers slowly grip the walls of their brown paper cup. The palm of your hand attracts to the warmth like it’s a firefly around a campfire. There are people all around, commotion in your brain, and probably music beating into your ears, but for that moment, for the second that your fingers make contact, you’re present. You become fully aware of the signals that the touch in your hand send to your brain, and then, like a slow drip from a Chemix, the thought collides with your taste buds. At that point, it might as well be a steak bone in front of a hound, as your mouth waters for the coffee to drop in Fahrenheit so that you can finally have a taste of the picture-perfect cup of Blue Bottle coffee you’ve envisioned to start your morning.

For us, it’s their iconic blend, Bella Donovan, offering hints of raspberry, flavors of chocolate, and maybe the taste of molasses, but anything from their signature menu is sure to do your day justice. When coffee is sniffed, tasted, and adored like a fine glass of Cabernet, you know you’ve entered the realm of something spectacular and scientific.

The hypothesis for the day’s research is as precise as the sun coming up tomorrow, and their conclusion is proven by long lines and repeat customers.

Scattered around different pockets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, Blue Bottle has created café laboratories, where the test subjects are New Yorkers. The clean, minimal coffee shops are flush with whites and beiges.  Like a science lab, everything inside has a purpose, nothing unaccounted for, nothing out of place. Your chemist for the day will start friendly conversation with you as he holds a wood-handled pouring kettle, slowly watering ground-up beans through a coffee dripper. The hypothesis for the day’s research is as precise as the sun coming up tomorrow, and their conclusion is proven by long lines and repeat customers. The fact is, Blue Bottle has blown up, and by blown up, we don’t mean coffee is exploding out of roasting machines ignited by a large food conglomerate.

Okay, let’s meet the elephant in the room head on. In this equation, Blue Bottle is Dumbo, and we are little Timothy, flying past a ringmaster who thinks he can only drink coffee that is stagnant to one location. Yes, Nestle now owns a majority share in Blue Bottle. What does this mean? It means that Blue Bottles are popping up all over the world and good coffee is that easy to get our addicted hands on. It means that James Freeman, the founder of Blue Bottle, can now concentrate on improving his coffee shop vision rather than dealing with hundreds of investors.

When the rock band The War on Drugs signed with the heavy hitter Atlantic for their last studio album, did we stop listening? No. And while Nestle now has a majority share, it was worked out in the deal that Blue Bottle remains a stand-alone entity with a separate board and governance, allowing the coffee gurus inside Blue Bottle to continue with that spectacular, scientific mission.

Whether it’s subtle tastes of caramel and almond in their 17ft Ceiling espresso, hints of plum jam in their single-origin Columbia Yacuanquer Constellations, or our beloved Bella Donavan, there is no denying that the coffee at Blue Bottle is anything shy of superb. The shop stays strapped with a compassionate crew and now a big money backer. This is the tale about how the little guy made his way to the top of the food chain. And in Brooklyn, in New York, and the USA, we f*cking love that story.