Silicon Valley’s favorite coffee startup will send the world’s best beans to your door within 2 days of roasting
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Blue Bottle Coffee
Unless I live in a vacuum of small, urban misfortunes that happen only to me so that the rest of the population may be spared, I can safely assume that most of you will know what it's like to stumble into the kitchen in the morning only to find out that you're out of coffee.
Which ends in one of two ways: a groggy, exaggerated feeling of despair, or an expensive Starbucks stop to repair morale.
But there is a way to completely cut out that experience for good and get better coffee out of the deal.
Blue Bottle Coffee is a startup you've probably heard of. It hails from Oakland, California, and has grown from founder James Freeman roasting coffee beans in a garage to the coffee darling of Silicon Valley.
The guiding principle of Blue Bottle is simple: Don't add more whip cream or introduce graham cracker crumbles, just make coffee the way coffee is supposed to be made.
Though it might come off as pretentious at first blush, it's truly more along the lines of passionately purist. Find the best beans, honor their flavor profiles, and put quality first — so you don't have to mask flavor with additives. It's the kind of thing Wikipedia calls a "major player in third-wave coffee."
Though the company has enjoyed tremendous success, becoming a cult-favorite and amassing a local mythology wherever it goes, it has expanded across the nation at the rate of a small, detail-oriented and finely-crafted artisanal coffee store. Which is to say, not fast enough.
But the limited locations (L.A., Bay Area, N.Y.C., Tokyo) don't really matter so much when you can order online.
With their subscription service, Blue Bottle At Home, you can get the same perfect, but hard-to-find coffee sent to your door as frequently as you like. And there is a reason the subscription trend is going strong, especially for everyday products like coffee: We have too much to do, and the more details we can take care of semi-permanently, the better.
Blue Bottle works directly with farmers around the world to source the best and most sustainable coffees available. Their single origin option, their most popular, is the result of their visits to farms around the world and features a delicious new single origin offering from Latin America, East Africa, or the Pacific Islands regularly. And in keeping with a tradition of perfection, Blue Bottle will send out their online orders of whole bean products within 24 hours of roasting, and 48 hours for the rest — because that's when the coffee is at its peak flavor. Coffee is roasted on vintage gear, put in compostable bags, and the beans you're getting are likely the results of a lasting relationship with an actual coffee bean farmer.
The subscription box breaks down into three main categories: blends, single origins, and espresso. Simply pick a category type on the site, the size of the bag (a half bag ~$8 and a standard ~$15), and select the frequency at which you’d like them delivered. Finish by paying, and never think about it again if you don't want to.
If your veins run dark roast or you're just in charge of ordering coffee for the office, you can get deliveries as often as once a week, or as infrequently as once a month. And if you're busy and removing the coffee runs is supposed to help you be more organized, not more cluttered, it's extremely easy to pause, cancel, or add shipments.
If you're interested in checking it out, you can try your first month on them.