If you were a coffee aficionado who could stop time, how would you use that ability? For James Freeman and Neil Day, the choice was obvious. Freeman and Day, respectively Blue Bottle Coffee‘s founder and technology vice president, sought a way to ship pre-ground coffee that would maintain the fresh-from-the-roaster taste on which the company was founded, according to Fortune. The result was Blue Bottle Perfectly Ground.
Blue Bottle Coffee’s standard since 2001 has been that no coffee would be served more than 48 hours from roasting. The company prides itself on the near-obsessive attention to details of time, temperature, weight, and grind on which uncompromising coffee lovers depend. The company runs 26 cafes in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, and Tokyo where equally demanding baristas and coffee connoisseurs celebrate the Blue Bottle Coffee creations from coffee beans selected from around the world.
The key to extending Blue Bottle Coffee’s reach beyond the company’s namesake cafes was the grinding process. As cited by Fortune, Day “developed a method to stop coffee from going stale by grinding every bean identically and completing the entire process from grind to packaging in an oxygen-free environment.”
Customers will be able to buy Blue Bottle Perfectly Ground October 4 in the firm’s shops in California and New York. Reaching even further, anyone can order the Perfectly Ground from the company’s website. At the time of this writing, seven of the company’s bean varieties were available “perfectly ground.”
The ground coffee choices, which read like a cross between poetry and exotic destinations, include Bella Donovan (heavy, comforting, deeply fruited), Giant Steps (viscous, fudgy, substantial), Decaf Noir (versatile, incisive, vivid), and four others.
Because the coffee arrives pre-ground, and because it makes a difference to how it should be ground, you can specify whether you’ll be brewing the coffee with a French press, Pour Over, Aeropress, or even a pedestrian coffee maker.
Blue Bottle Coffee may not have found a way to actually put time on in a bottle, but it sounds like grinding and packaging in an oxygen-free environment prevents oxidation which, after all, ages us, too.