Coffees That Rattle Our Expectations

Modern life rarely grants us opportunities for awe. In the daily rush, it’s not often we come across something so beautiful that time stops—if only for a moment.

Good coffee has the power to do that on a regular basis. A few times a year at the cupping table, we taste a new release of such rare quality that it upends all our expectations.

With our Exceedingly Rare coffees, we want to share that experience with you. Every month or two, we release a new single origin that widens our sense of what’s possible.

These coffees are nuanced with high fruit intensity, stunning florality, and complex acidity. They’re also some of our highest-scoring coffees of the year. But it’s about more than how they taste.

“Our goal with this program is to highlight innovation in the specialty coffee world—whether it’s an up-and-coming region, an experimental process, or a rare variety,” says Shaun Puklavetz, Blue Bottle’s green coffee buyer. These coffees are truly rare, often available in minuscule quantities, and the Exceedingly Rare program allows the most obsessive among us to taste the forefront of what’s next.

But with our program, we’re not just chasing fads. When selecting Exceedingly Rare coffees, we only work with producers who have transparent seed-to-cup sourcing and with whom we hope to create long-term, sustainable relationships. Sometimes, we’re purchasing a small experimental lot as well as a larger amount of another coffee from the same producer. Other times—as was the case with coffees from Myanmar—the coffees start as Exceedingly Rare offerings and then, in subsequent years, are made at a large enough scale that they can become a regular offering in our in-cafe single origin releases.

Still, deliciousness remains our top priority. “If I gave you a cup of one of these coffees and you knew nothing about it, you would taste right away why we chose them,” says Puklavetz.