Our Story
KOLSHITSKY & THE FIRST BLUE BOTTLE
The apocryphal tale goes like this: In the late 1600s, the Turkish army swept across much of Eastern and Central Europe, arriving at Vienna in 1683. Besieged and desperate, the Viennese needed an emissary who could cross Turkish lines to get a message to nearby Polish troops. Franz George Kolshitsky, who spoke Turkish and Arabic, took on the assignment disguised in Turkish uniform. After many perilous close calls, Kolshitsky completed his valiant deed, delivering news of the Poles’ imminent rescue to Vienna.
On September 13, the Turks were repelled from the city, leaving everything they brought, including strange bags of beans, which were thought to be camel feed.
319 YEARS LATER
319 YEARS LATER
In the early 2000s, in Oakland, California, a slightly disaffected freelance musician and coffee lunatic, weary of the commercial coffee enterprise and stale, overly roasted beans, decided to open a roaster for people who were clamoring for the actual taste of fresh coffee. Using a minuscule six-pound batch roaster, he made a historic vow: “I will only sell coffee less than 48 hours out of the roaster to my guests, so they may enjoy coffee at peak flavor. I will only use the finest, most delicious, and responsibly sourced beans.”
In honor of Kolshitsky’s heroics, he named his business Blue Bottle Coffee and began another chapter in the history of superlative coffee.
Now, more than fifteen years later, and thanks to the enthusiastic support of many loyal guests, Blue Bottle Coffee has grown to a network of cafes across the U.S., Japan, and Korea. We are still united by the simple purpose of getting great coffee to everyone who asks for it. We have gotten even more specific about freshness and peak flavor. Improbably and delightfully, there are hundreds of us now.
We look forward to seeing you soon.
Our Coffee
“Green coffee is a living thing, more like produce than an inert spice or candy, and each one has a unique life span based on who produced it and where it's from.”
—Charlie Habegger, Green Coffee Buyer
Flavor in coffee is a crescendo—no part of the journey is boring. In our cafes, we taste each coffee to determine the precise days on which it will achieve peak flavor (Hayes Valley Espresso, for instance, really sings on days 4–7). We only serve the absolute freshest coffee to you in our cafes and on our webshop.
HOW DO WE EVALUATE DELICIOUSNESS?
HOW DO WE EVALUATE DELICIOUSNESS?
Basically, it’s a science experiment.
We set up blind taste tests at different days out of the roaster. We taste each batch, repeatedly. James and our team of roasting and quality control experts cup all of our coffees before they go into the world. We repeat this process every day. Each time we change a component of one of our blends, we start over. Every time a new single origin is introduced (three to five times per month) we go through the process anew.
We then identify a window of peak flavor. When a coffee hits that range, it goes into service at our cafes and onto the shelves as whole beans.