Blue Bottle Coffee Will Open in Harvard Square

Blue Bottle Coffee trailer by Niall Kennedy on Flickr/Creative Commons

Boston’s coffee scene is amped up lately, with local roasters like Gracenote and George Howell opening beautiful new cafés, and acclaimed national roasters like Philadelphia’s La Colombe and Chicago’s Intelligentsia making moves into town.

Now, Blue Bottle Coffee is planning to get in on our caffeine addiction. The Oakland, California, roaster plans a big Boston expansion, CEO Bryan Meehan told the Boston Globe, with a Harvard Square café slated to open next year. Back Bay will be next.

“I think Boston could be a market where we could have as many stores as we have in the Bay Area,” Meehan told the paper’s Washington bureau chief and resident coffee scribe, Matt Viser. “Boston is an academic center where people seek out learning. And given the type of things we do with our coffee, people will be interested to know more about coffee from Blue Bottle.”

Blue Bottle debuted nearly 15 years ago, founded on the premise of fresh coffee roasted just enough. The beans aren’t readily found around Boston, as Blue Bottle pledges to sell coffee no more than 48 hours post-roast. It does offer a subscription service, though, promising that all coffees are shipped within 24 hours of roasting.

Currently, Blue Bottle has 10 locations in the Bay Area, plus handfuls in New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. It also sells ready-to-drink coffee at shops in California, New York, and select other states (but not Massachusetts—yet). A new, 15,000-square foot facility is opening imminently in New York City, which will roast the beans for Boston, Viser reports.

The coffee company has raised millions from tech investors, including Fidelity Management and Research, Google Ventures, and executives at Instagram, Twitter, and Flickr. Blue Bottle is often likened to the Apple Store of the coffee world, a clean, sleek counterpart to third wave forebears Starbucks and Peet’s.

Blue Bottle is slated for a late summer 2017 opening in Harvard Square. Meehan is about to sign the Back Bay lease, he told Viser, and the company is also looking at other spots for more openings in 2018.

Blue Bottle Coffee, opening late summer 2017 at 40 Bow St., Harvard Square, Cambridge, bluebottlecoffee.com.