Blue Bottle Coffee

Blue Bottle Coffee was founded by James Freeman in Oakland, California in 2002, when Freeman, a freelance musician, began roasting coffee and selling it at the Ferry Building farmers’ market in San Francisco. The brand’s founding commitment was to coffee that was roasted to order and sold within a specific freshness window, which was a direct challenge to the supermarket coffee model where packaged coffee might sit on a shelf for months. The freshness commitment, combined with a serious approach to sourcing and roasting, made Blue Bottle a reference point in the specialty coffee movement’s emergence in the mid-2000s.

The Georgetown cafe at 1046 Potomac Street NW is on the lower Potomac Street block near the C and O Canal, in a location that gives the coffee shop access to the Georgetown waterfront foot traffic while maintaining the slightly quieter character of the canal-adjacent streets. The cafe serves the Georgetown resident and visitor who wants the full Blue Bottle menu: the pour overs, which are available in a rotating selection of single-origin coffees that reflect the current roasting program; the espresso program, which uses a house blend and the standard espresso service formats from the cortado through the flat white; and the New Orleans Iced Coffee, which is the Blue Bottle product that has become one of the more recognizable drinks in the specialty coffee market.

The New Orleans Iced Coffee is the drink most associated with Blue Bottle outside the core specialty coffee community. It is made from coffee brewed in the New Orleans cold brew style, which combines chicory with the coffee and dilutes the concentrate with organic milk rather than water. The result is a richer, slightly bitter and roasty iced coffee with the dairy integrated rather than added, which produces a different texture from standard cold brew with milk added at service.

The Potomac Street location is open daily from 7am to 6pm. The cafe seats customers for in-person work and conversation and provides the quiet that the canal-adjacent street provides compared to the M Street commercial block. The Potomac Street location places Blue Bottle in the canal-adjacent Georgetown area, in the section below M Street that the C and O Canal towpath connects to the waterfront. The morning traffic from the Georgetown residential neighborhood above and the towpath cyclists and runners who begin their rides and runs from the canal area provide the customer base for the early morning hours. Blue Bottle’s expansion from the Bay Area through New York to other major American cities involved Nestle’s acquisition of the brand in 2017, which provided the capital for the expansion while raising questions in the specialty coffee community about the brand’s independence. The coffee program has maintained the quality standards that the founding vision established, and the Georgetown cafe operates with the same sourcing and roasting commitments that the Oakland origin produced. The Potomac Street address is open daily from 7am to 6pm.