Blue Bottle Summer

It’s Time for a New Kind of Coffee

A DREAM BLEND

Our new Summer Blend fulfills our long-held dream to combine two coffees so good, we ordinarily sprinkle them into blends sparingly, like rare spices, or reserve them as single origins. One from Kenya, one from Ethiopia, they capture the fruit and effervescence possible within the best specialty coffee. Together, they might radically alter your idea of what coffee can be.

Notes of magnolia, nectarine, and sun tea

Many of our classic blends are designed around classic roast flavors such as chocolate and brown sugar. For the second in our seasonal series, we also sought a blend that could pick up where Spring left off, carrying us into the warmer months with a coffee that could be as good as a pour over as it is served over ice. With these long, hot days upon us, we craved something to match our frame of mind when all we really want to do is to read on a blanket in the park, or daydream about our summer crush. We wanted to highlight coffee’s sunnier, refreshing qualities—its florality and fruit.

That’s when we looked to East Africa, to two of coffee’s most storied origins: Ethiopia and Kenya.

ORIGINS

Between them, Ethiopia and Kenya bookend thousands of years of coffee history, holding down opposite ends of the timeline: Ethiopia is coffee’s birthplace, where the plant first emerged and where coffee trees still grow wild. Though Ethiopia shares a border with Kenya, coffee plants didn’t arrive in Kenya until the late 1800s, relatively late in coffee’s global expansion. Yet today both countries produce some of the finest coffee in the world.

Proof that Coffee Comes from a Fruit

The best East African specialty coffees taste almost nothing like the classic dark, roasted flavors that have come to be associated with the drink. Signature examples burst with floral or fruited flavors. Washed Arabica from Ethiopia are beloved for their delicate, sweet flavors that remind us of peak summer blossoms such as magnolia or rose. Kenyan coffees have the kind of juicy fruit that can make your mouth pucker and all but stain your chin, like tart blackberry or stone fruit. They’re also known for their phosphorescence—an effervescence stemming from a flavor compound that naturally occurs in coffee, known as phosphoric acid. You might know its presence from fizzy cola, to which it’s often added.

We originally planned for the Ethiopia to predominate and to sprinkle in the Kenya as an accent. But a 60-40 ratio proved the most delicious. We wonder if that phosphorescence has something to do with it: the compound is thought to turn up the volume on surrounding flavors. Whatever the causes, we like to think of Summer Blend as two coffees combining into one shining fireworks display.

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