For all who don't know, Blue Bottle did for coffee what the Beatles did for music. The name is synonymous with high brow coffee culture. (Along with Intelligentsia but that is for another post.)
Blue Bottle specializes in pour over and syphon coffee. They also make espresso drinks and apparently have pastries - didn't notice any when I was there, but it's frankly very hard to focus on much else than the beautiful glass cold brew machines and the rows of syphons.
What you see here is a halogen bulb underneath heating the water to just under boiling, taking this old, English way of brewing coffee into the 2000's.
To be perfectly honest though, when I went to this location I was much younger and very uneducated about coffee. I knew about friendly, neighborhood coffee shop culture but this is an altogether different animal. There was no way I could have appreciated Blue Bottle for more than its welcoming aesthetic at the time. Now, I just feel I need to go back.
After all, this is the store that inspired one of my favorite coffee shops in South Carolina, Black Tap.
The major thing that has been impressed upon me from every coffee fanatic I've ever run into is that Blue Bottle is one of the most influential coffee shops in the US. I think the reasons for that are very clear, they have excellent branding and they were actually trying to be something different to consumers than what S.BUX is.
This is a $15M company. How did they get this way? Well for one thing, this isn't really a sit down place. They have seating but no wifi. They were also not intended to be for the busy person either. The focus is on slow brewed coffee: it's pour over, syphon, espresso and cold brew. High-end with a price tag. And at the time, they were one of very few places doing that.
Their marketing is consistent, even selling impossibly small commercial cold brew.
I hope one day I get to go back to San Francisco and relive this coffee shop with the knowledge I have now. I think it will be a different experience entirely.
0 comments:
Post a Comment